Ritenour High School is a long three-story school of red brick with restrained Collegiate detailing, stepped across a terraced hillside site. Bands of woven basketweave brick in red and dark headers run as friezes below the parapet and above the entrances, and limestone trims the windows, water table, and door surrounds. The main entrance sits within a Tudor-arched limestone frame carrying the carved name RITENOUR HIGH SCHOOL, beneath a low central brick tower. A projecting gymnasium wing steps up to a broad gabled front, its triple round-arched entrance marked GYMNASIUM in stone. Ribbon windows light the long classroom ranges.
Ritenour High School stands at the eastern edge of its district on St. Charles Rock Road, in Breckenridge Hills. Its cornerstone is dated 1949 and credits the firm of William B. Ittner, Inc., which carried the Ittner school-design tradition on past the founder's death in 1936; the school opened about 1950, and its first class graduated in 1951. It succeeded the district's original 1924 high school a few miles west, now Ritenour Middle School. The Ritenour district is among the oldest in St. Louis County, formed in 1867, and holds an unusually early record on race for an area district: it educated African-American children from its first year and opened the county's first high-school classes for Black students in 1913. The building remains the district's high school.
