Julie Glassberg/The New York Times
JAMAICA NOTABLES Clockwise from top left: Bob Beamon, ’66, Olympic champion; Michael Weiner, ’58, now known as Michael Savage, conservative author and talk show host; Letty Cottin Pogrebin ’55, Co-founder of Ms. Magazine; Judith Shapiro, ’59, President, Barnard University.
"INSIDE the high-ceilinged vestibule of the Georgian Revival showplace that is Jamaica High School, a red sign reads, “Eighty percent of success is just showing up.” Alas, the school’s average attendance rate this year is 79 percent."
Jamaica, which spent most of a century as a jewel in the city’s public school system, is now slated to be closed for poor performance. At a recent public hearing, hundreds of parents, teachers and alumni defended its record, and angrily asked why the city did not do more as the school’s graduation rate slipped below 50 percent starting in 2002.
The original Jamaica High opened in 1896 with a few hundred students in what was then a rural enclave of central Queens. The current building opened in 1927 and, in its heyday, had an enrollment topping 5,000. From the letter sweaters and pleated skirts of the late 1950s to the secretary of education’s naming it one of the nation’s outstanding high schools in 1985, Jamaica maintained a strong reputation. Among the graduates found in the pages of its yearbook, Folio, are Walter O’Malley, longtime owner of the Brooklyn (and, later, Los Angeles) Dodgers (class of 1922); the author and composer Paul Bowles (1928); John N. Mitchell, President Richard M. Nixon’s attorney general (1931); Stephen Jay Gould (1958); and the men who became the Cleftones (1955).