The history of Ariel Community Academy can be traced back to the end of the nineteenth century when in 1889 Greenwood Avenue School, located at 1119 East 46th Street, and the surrounding area were annexed by Chicago. On January 22, 1891, the Board of Education authorized plans for a ten-room addition to Greenwood Avenue School, plans that also proposed moving the original school building to the back of the Greenwood School lot. Records suggest that this process was completed in 1893.

On June 22, 1904, Greenwood Avenue School was renamed Shakespeare Elementary, a name the school kept through two other structural additions, one in 1925, another in 1953. In the 1920s portables at Lake Park Avenue near 41st Street served as a branch of Shakespeare Elementary. These portables became a separate elementary school under the name Oakenwald on September 13, 1933.

After more than one hundred years of educating children, Shakespeare Elementary School finally closed in 1991. Such a beautiful Romanesque building would not sit unused for long, however. By the late nineties, renovations were underway as Ariel Community Academy, then located in Kennicott Park at 4434 South Lake Park Avenue, and North Kenwood-Oakland Charter School, located in Saint James Methodist Church at 4611 South Ellis Avenue, prepared to move into the old Shakespeare School building. Though Ariel does share its name with a character from one of Shakespeare’s final plays, it should be noted that Ariel Community Academy is not named directly after the airy sprite that bends to Prospero’s every whim in The Tempest. Rather, it is named for the Ariel Education Initiative, an organization instrumental in the formation of the Academy.

Ariel Community Academy and North Kenwood-Oakland Charter School, a University of Chicago Charter School, still serve students today at 1119 East 46th Street.