Perry High School is a public high school located in Gilbert, Arizona and is one of the recent CUSD high schools founded in 2007. The school's design was based on the layout of Basha High School, another school in the Chandler Unified School District, with an additional "F" building built exclusively for CTE classes in the same place as the "H" building in Basha High School.County LibraryWhen Hamilton High School and Basha High School were built, the city of Chandler incorporated branch libraries into those sites. Perry is within Gilbert town limits, and so the Chandler Unified School District worked to incorporate a Maricopa County Library District branch into the site. The Perry Branch Library opened in June 2007. It was the first public library located in a high school in Gilbert and the first public library in the nation to drop the Dewey Decimal System, opting instead for a bookstore-like system that places non-fiction books into categories based on subject. This change brought national attention to the library and provoked debate about the effectiveness of the Dewey Decimal System. The library also has arts and crafts projects on a regular basis.The county library is the second to be integrated inside a high school: Boulder Creek High School in Anthem features a Maricopa County regional library.Fine Arts DepartmentPerry has a fine arts department headed by department chair Sharon Biemond. Biemond is the teacher of all sculpture classes. In the 2008-2009 school year as well as the 2009-2010 school year Perry's sculpture students competed with those at Basha High School in a loose competition called "Pumas on Parade" ("Bear Brigade" at Basha)where students construct "life sized" paper-mâché representations of their mascots and decorate them to fit a chosen theme. The rules have been rudimentary for both seasons in that the school who makes the "best looking" sculptures wins. At the end of the assignment the teachers from both schools exchange emails containing photos of all entries.
