Who closed the Bronx’s high schools?
There’s a story that has to be told. It needs details. It needs to include conversations, arguments, protests, planning. It needs exact dates. I can’t do all of that. It needs to be told better than I can tell it. But I can start.
In recent years, nine Bronx academic comprehensive high schools were closed and three were down-sized, two sabotaged so badly that I assume they will be retargeted for closure. Also, three Bronx vocational high schools were closed, and the fourth was down-sized.
No large or medium-sized Bronx high school has escaped unscathed (save Bronx Science, which serves relatively few Bronx kids)
The usual narrative says that Bloomberg and Klein did this.
The usual narrative is (mostly) wrong.
Bloomberg and Klein completed, enthusiastically, viciously, work that was started by others. Let’s see who they were.
When I began teaching (substitute in March 1997), it was hard for me to wrap my head around the huge number of high schools in the Bronx. I came from a high school that served three towns. The city next door had three high schools for the whole city (plus a tiny alternative high school, plus a tiny arts school ).
But the Bronx! DeWitt Clinton, Walton, John F Kennedy, Christopher Columbus, Theodore Roosevelt, Evander Childs, Harry S Truman, Herbert Lehman, South Bronx, Morris, Adlai Stevenson. Then there were the vocational schools: Grace Dodge, Samuel Gompers, Alfred E Smith, Jane Addams. Each one of these schools was bigger than the entire district where I had been educated.
And there were more schools. Bronx Science, which I knew was mostly kids from other boroughs. There were Bronx Regional, University Heights, and a handful of small, alternative schools of one sort or Who closed the Bronx’s high schools? | JD2718: