Bridgeport High School was four months old when the Daily Post debuted on Feb. 7, 1883.

The debut of the school, at 300 Congress St., was considered the "educational event" of the year in the region but it was hard to find any mention of local schools in daily papers of the time.

The Bridgeport school district, consolidating 11 separate tax-collecting entities, was in its seventh year.

The student population was increasing and the need for new schools was a constant. It was not uncommon for the Board of Education to rent rooms and storefronts to accommodate the need for more space.

There were 15 schools and two rented rooms in the city. The school superintendent's annual salary was $2,200.

The per-pupil cost, according to the city's annual report, was $8.51.

Today, there are 21,000 students in Bridgeport Public Schools and the schools superintendent makes $214,983.

A century and a quarter ago, there were 5,771 students in city schools. Of those, 424 had perfect attendance. On the flip side, 1,793 cases of tardiness were recorded in 1883, an increase of 370. Such a problem was lateness and truancy that a full page of the 1883 city register was devoted to discussing it.

"If parents realized the importance of teaching their children the habit of punctuality, they would take more pains to have them regular and constant in their attendance at school," then Schools Supt. H.M. Harrington wrote.

That year, he noted, 20 arrests for truancy were made and four

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boys were sent to reform school. Harrington suggested the establishment of an "ungraded" school where special attention could be paid to those whose attendance is irregular.

"The testimony of other cities where these schools have been established is uniformly in their favor," Harrington wrote.

Surrounding communities were dealing with their own growth at the time.

In Stratford, by 1883 small overcrowded one-room schoolhouses had been consolidated into a single school district.

Two years later there would be the eight-room Stratford Graded School, located where East Broadway met Main Street. The Graded School packed eight grades into seven rooms, letting the high school occupy the eighth. Soon known as Center School, it's located where the Stratford Board of Education offices are now.

In 1883, Seymour was a year away from building its first public high school on Bank Street. It was considered to be one of the best high schools in the state, boasting cold, fresh running water.

Later it was used as an elementary school and became known as Center School.

Derby officials, in their 1883 annual report, congratulated themselves on having a school system "in arrangement and execution" that compared favorably with any other city in the state. It recorded a student population of 3,015 that year, a growth of 209 pupils in a year's time. Ansonia was still a borough of Derby at the time. Derby now has a student population of 1,461. Ansonia has 2,726 students.

The 1883 boom necessitated a new room added to the Up-town Derby school; the division of one room into two in the Derby Narrows School; an addition to the primary room in the Ansonia district, which had three schools, the Brick School, Factory School and High School; and heating improvements, painting and addition of 60 volumes to the library at the Birmingham school, later to be called the Irving School.

The school was considered the gem of the district, boasting 12 rooms and boys who consistently went straight to Yale College.

In Trumbull, the Beach Hill School, the town's first high school, was a decade old by 1883. It was a private boarding school and many students still gravitated to school in Bridgeport.

Milford, in 1883, made Herbert I. Mathewson principal of its high school. He later became school superintendent in Milford, a job he kept until his death in 1927. By 1883, Milford had consolidated its individual schools into a single district. There were 498 students in Milford schools by 1882. By 1889 that number grew to 705. Today there are 7,504.

Fairfield by 1860 was educating 1,204 pupils, spread among 17 common schools. Today there are 9,500. In the late 1800s, the quality of Fairfield schools, according to Fairfield: The Biography of a Community, was said to vary from school to school, teacher to teacher. Fairfield didn't consolidate into a single school district until 1887. It also educated only up through the sixth grade. There was brief talk of a high school in 1885, but voters turned down the idea.

Not until 1914 did the town vote to create one. Until then, high school students went to Bridgeport or Westport.