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is a city in Cook County, Illinois. The population was 23,463 at the 2000 census.
]As the largest settlement in the southern part of Cook County in the middle of the nineteenth century, Blue Island was an important trading and cultural center. The village offered educational opportunity to its residents as early as 1845 in the form of a private school for girls that was operated by local citizens, and public education was introduced in 1846 with the construction of a one-room schoolhouse that served the community exclusively for that purpose until the first Whittier School was built in 1854. The one-room schoolhouse was repurposed several times in subsequent years and still stands, much remodeled, as a comfortable house on Greenwood Ave. The public school district as a legal entity (now Blue Island School District 130) was established in 1887, and the current high school district (Community High School District 218) was created in 1927, replacing earlier versions from 1897 and 1903. Blue Island Community High School (Now Dwight D. Eisenhower High School) was accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools (now North Central Association - Commission on Accreditation and School Improvement) in 1899. As president of Columbia University, Eisenhower was the keynote speaker at the dedication of the new facility on Sacramento Ave. for Blue Island Community High School in 1951, and the building was renamed in his honor in 1962.
Blue Island hosted a number of educational conferences during the 1850’s, and because of this (and thru the influence of Benjamin Sanders, whose tenure with the Cook County Board was during that time) Chicago State University was founded in Blue Island in 1867 as the Cook County Normal (or Teacher's) School in the classrooms of the old Whittier School building on Vermont Street. This arrangement lasted until 1870, when the new campus for the college was completed in what is now the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago on of land that was donated by L. W. Beck for the purpose in 1868.