What is the name of the school in "The Breakfast Club"?

The school in "The Breakfast Club" is Shermer High School, commonly shortened to Shermer High.

The film follows five students who attend Saturday detention at the fictional school in Shermer, Illinois. Although they belong to sharply different social groups, the detention brings together Brian Johnson, Andrew Clark, Allison Reynolds, Claire Standish, and John Bender. Their conversations gradually reveal that the labels assigned to them—brain, athlete, basket case, princess, and criminal—do not tell their whole stories.

Vice Principal Richard Vernon supervises the detention and assigns the students a thousand-word essay about who they think they are. The school therefore serves as more than a location: it is the setting where the film examines teenage identity, parental pressure, class expectations, and the limits of school cliques.

Shermer High is fictional. The film was shot at the former Maine North High School in Des Plaines, Illinois, with the library detention room recreated as a larger set in the school’s gymnasium. That real filming location is sometimes confused with the school’s fictional name.