Theodore Roosevelt High School (New York City)

The climate

In the early 20th century, American educators sought to expand and tailor schooling, then extend school enrollment into adolescence, seen as a prime opportunity for proper socialization, especially to assimilate the rapidly growing immigrant populations in cities. Newly defining or even creating the transition from childhood to adulthood, high schools became venues where youth vied for control over identity, behavior, and allegiance, while the 19th-century esteem for Protestant respectability eroded amid emerging quests for intricate cosmopolitanism. In a multiethnic city like New York, the high school was intentionally employed as a fundamental agent of socialization. Entering 1918, the Bronx had two high schools: Morris and Evander Childs.

The opening

The Roosevelt High School was organized on November 14, 1918, from the commercial classes comprising a Morris High School annex conducted in PS 31 at 144th Street and Mott Avenue, thereupon Roosevelt's location. Initially led by teacher Edward M Williams, Roosevelt's 830 students got their first principal—William R Hayward—on December 9, 1918. On January 8, 1919, two days after the earlier United States President Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive era leader born in Manhattan, had died, New York City schools' Board of Superintendents proposed a name change, approved two days later by the New York City Board of Education. The next day, principal Hayward announced the Theodore Roosevelt High School, and sought its namesake's spirit to preside over it. Rapidly growing, Theodore Roosevelt High School gained its own annex—16 classrooms in PS 47—on January 22, 1919.

The borough

From 1900 to 1920, New York City's fastest growing borough was the Bronx, whose population grew over two and a half times in that period. At 1922, the Bronx Board of Trade concluded, "It is probably due to the fact that its housing conditions are of the best that The Bronx for years has had the lowest death rate and the highest birth rate of any of the Boroughs". In the Bronx from 1901 to 1920, nearly $457 million was spent on building construction—some $24 million per year—but 1921 saw a spending record, over $75 million. Yankee Stadium opened in 1923. By 1922, Theodore Roosevelt had over 1460 commercial students, focusing on either accounting or secretarial skills in courses ranging from one to four years. The school obtained a second annex on September 25, 1925 (in PS 70), a third on February 1, 1926 (in PS 73), and a fourth on February 1, 1928 (in PS 39 in Manhattan).

The building

By 1920, there had been a call to construct for Theodore Roosevelt High School its own building. Entering its ninth year, Roosevelt carried over 150 teachers and 4000 students. Yet in 1926, ground had been broken on May 18 and the cornerstone laid on November 17 for Theodore Roosevelt High School's building, which opened in September 1928. The high school was in the Bronx on Fordham Road, across the street from Fordham University, founded in 1841, whose sprawling campus of Collegiate Gothic buildings was several street blocks east of the Grand Concourse. From 1920 to 1930, rented mostly by affluent doctors, lawyers, and businessmen, upscale apartments rapidly went up along the Grand Concourse—apartments highly coveted—where up to some 80% of residents were Jews, leading the Bronx's rapid growth of population, permitted by rapid travel from lower Manhattan on newly built subway lines connected to Bronx trolley lines.

Depression

Starting in 1929, the Great Depression damaged many livelihoods in the Bronx. And yet the borough's Democratic Party's boss, Edward J Flynn, had close ties with Franklin D Roosevelt—cousin of Theodore Roosevelt and previously New York state's governor—who became US President in 1933. Via Flynn's influence, US government then heavily subsidized public works in the Bronx, whose Central Post Office, Triborough Bridge, Whitestone Bridge, and Orchard Beach were built, while parks and schools were revitalized, in the 1930s. Reachable locally by trollies, Orchard Beach, unlike the carnival atmosphere at Coney Island in Brooklyn, had elegant bathhouses, and was called by a community leader "The Riviera of the Bronx". And yet the Bronx retained plenty farmland even in the 1940s. Covering two city blocks square, Theodore Roosevelt High School's building was among America's largest and best equipped with science laboratories, sewing and music rooms, automotive and woodworking shops.

Populations

Theodore Roosevelt High School's area was mostly of American whites, while Irish was the predominant minority group, Italians and Jews were increasing, and there were very few blacks. Having fled potato famine in the 19th century and found jobs in America largely laying railroads, the Irish were the earliest immigrants, and, dominating the high school's immediate neighborhood, frequently harassed Jews, whose families, however, were usually fervent about education. The high school was in the Bronx's Belmont section, which soon became a Little Italy represented highly in Roosevelt's student body. Altogether, Roosevelt students came from diverse neighborhoods, including the Bronx's affluent strip, the Grand Concourse, whose luxury apartment buildings, built in the 1920s, were largely usurped by young professionals, mostly Jews.

In 1930, holding a master's degree in education from Columbia University, Sarah L Delany had had severe trouble finding a job in her area of expertise, and maneuvered to be hired without administration of a particular high school having met her. A shocking sight on her first day of work—an American black showing up to begin teaching at a "white high school"—Delany became an awkward presence, but, once hired through bureaucratic formality, posed too great a difficultly to fire. Theodore Roosevelt thus became New York City's first high school to employ a nonwhite teacher of home economics. Decades after retiring in 1960, Delany rejoiced, "I spent the rest of my career teaching at excellent high schools!" But by the 1950s, despite large emigration of blacks and Hispanics from the American South and the Caribbean to New York City, members of a gang, the Baldies, white and mostly Italian, menaced them in the neighborhood of Roosevelt, whose enrollment remained overwhelmingly white.

Participation

Focused on adolescence as a period to integrate youth, especially from immigrant populations, into society via high school, American educators emphasized voluntary participation in extracurricular activities. From 1931 to 1947, some 80% of graduates from New York City high schools had been extracurricularly active, as in sports or clubs. Participation was highest, 99%, at Bay Ridge High School, a girls' school in Brooklyn, and was lowest, 56%, at Theodore Roosevelt High School.

Throughout the city, some 75% of blacks participated extracurricularly, but black boys' prominence only on track teams suggests a strong exclusionary bias. Many parents, especially of recent immigration, wanted their daughters away from men, a factor important to Italians, comprising nearly one in three of Bay Ridge High School's students, who commuted from a wide area since parents viewed this school as "safe", like a parochial school. Though the Brooklyn section Bay Ridge was heavily American white—as were one in four of its high school's students—perhaps faculty encouraged universal involvement and prevented spontaneous ethnic segregation, as Italian girls and the few black girls alike were extracurricularly involved far more than elsewhere, a stark contrast from black boys at Roosevelt.

World War

In 1938, while still a Roosevelt student, June Allyson made it onto the Broadway chorus line Sing Out the News. With World War II's 1939 outbreak, curricula at American public schools were redirected toward a war effort. On October 8, 1940, vowing to keep America out the war, Wendell Willkie, the Republican Party's candidate for US Presidency in that year's election, gave a speech at Theodore Roosevelt High School, and died that day in 1944. By then, Allyson had become "the apple of Hollywood's eye in the war years and everyone's notion of the girl next door". Meanwhile, preparing students less for college entrance than for practical jobs, Roosevelt "wasn't a progressive academic institution" and "never was".

On a rainy day, October 21, 1944, campaigning for reelection, President Franklin D Roosevelt rode by motorcade through the Bronx tiredly waving, while children in onlooking crowds apprehended a connection to a world outside the Bronx. For many adults, including some who taught at Roosevelt, the 1945 death of President FDR—in the White House a dozen years while leading America through the Great Depression and World War II—severed a sense of continuity with the past. In 1947, opposing communism, Catholic War Veterans of New York accused the city's Board of Education of aiding subversives by letting communist group American Youth for Democracy hold meetings in Roosevelt's building, used by diverse organizations.

Transformation

In the late 1940s, Rocco Colavito, born in 1933 in the Bronx, dropped out Roosevelt after his sophomore year to play semipro baseball. At a Yankee Stadium tryout, after just one throw, Colavito was coveted by a scout for Cleveland's Minor League team and signed a contract at age 17. By the late 1950s, on Cleveland's Major League team, he had inspired fans' maxim Don't knock the Rock, known as "everything a ballplayer should be". In the 1959 baseball season, a June 10 article in the Sporting News named Rocky Colavito the American League player most likely to break Babe Ruth's record of 60 home runs in a season. Yet Rocky experienced a slump, and was traded by Frank "Trader" Lane to the Detroit Tigers in 1960. Upon sportswriter Terry Pluto's 1994 "loving tale" of a curse on the Cleveland Indians ever since, Colavito claimed innocence. Yet recalling "a big mistake", Rocky Colavito had already rued, "I didn't want kids to say, 'He dropped out of school and he made the big leagues'". Meanwhile, in the 1950s, the music group Dion and the Belmonts had emerged from the Bronx's Belmont section.

In the 1960s, newly hired teacher Alfred Posamentier organized Roosevelt's first mathematics teams, yet soon left to join academia and spearhead efforts to improve mathematics teachers' effectiveness. Roosevelt students of the late 1960s included Ace Frehley, later the lead guitarist of Kiss, and Chazz Palminteri, later the actor whose 1988 play A Bronx Tale was partly his own childhood memoir, based in Belmont, adapted to a 1993 screenplay, Robert De Niro's directing debut. Frehley had attended a private Lutheran school but, "too wild", was ejected, went to the public DeWitt Clinton High School, "a progressive place" in the Bronx, but was one of only a couple of students with long hair, refused to cut it, and was transferred to Roosevelt, where he focused on art courses, got bored and dropped out, yet returned and graduated. Palminteri, too, had attended Clinton, but disliked its being all-male and transferred to Roosevelt, where this poor student, who got girls to do his homework, graduated in 1973 at age 21. Although later actor Jimmie Walker's diploma was from Clinton, he met its requirements in 1965 by attending night classes at Roosevelt, whose summer sessions, too, taught students of other high schools.

Drug culture

During the 1950s, US government's policy shifted Puerto Rico's economy from agriculture to manufacturing. Seeking sustainable work, then, many Puerto Ricans emigrated to New York City, where emigrant Southern blacks and Caribbean blacks increasingly emerged from poverty, a progress that slowed in the 1960s and halted by about 1970 amid rising stagflation and US government's focus on the Vietnam War. Previously scarce within American ethnic minority groups, illegal drug selling emerged in the 1960s. Lowering racial tensions, heroin use by adolescents in gangs sent white gang members, seeking heroin, into neighborhoods of blacks and Puerto Ricans, who in turn, no longer menaced by white gang members, increasingly enrolled at Theodore Roosevelt High School, where illegal drug selling became prevalent by the late 1960s. Yet heroin lowered gang violence by providing a new gang style or masculinity measure, while gang members possessing this narcotic sought to diminish police attention.

Urban decay

Trailing the New York City financial crisis that in 1975 nearly closed the city's government—an insurance company bailed out the city once the White House refused to help—was New York City's 1977 blackout, which triggered massive looting that bankrupted stores. Many Bronx neighborhoods, resembling rubble by 1979, went aflame, while apartment buildings were abandoned or else sold to lesser landlords amid severe, rapid urban decay. The view of schools as a collaborative effort emphasized agreement among workers, potentially in the educational bureaucracy for decades, while points of central importance in educating children, each in high school for but a few years, fell off the agenda, dominated by the lowest common denominator of adults' widest agreement. While many educational administrators and officials maneuvered to secure school jobs for families and friends, the children's education got insufficient attention. Although it takes a strong leader, perhaps unpopular, to turn schools around, voters may lack the interest or attention to vote accordingly. Dissatisfied parents who have ample means enroll their children in private schools—or move to other areas.

Local problems

From 1970 to 1980, New York City's population fell from nearly eight to little over seven million via white flight, while crime, ranging from vandalism to murder, soared, and then the crack epidemic struck Bronx high schools were reputed as the city's worst, while Roosevelt signified the degeneration. In 1984, Theodore Roosevelt High School had New York City's highest dropout rate. In 1986, Roosevelt had a new principal, Paul B Shapiro, and spent an extra $750 thousand—atop its normal budget of $10 million—to raise school attendance.

The territory of the New York City Police Department's 46th Precinct—adjacent westward of the 48th Precinct's that includes Roosevelt—was the most criminal and homicidal of New York City's 75 precincts. The zone high school for neighborhoods policed by the 46th, Roosevelt received those troubles, including police officers menacing local residents and aiding illegal drug dealers. In 1989, a pilot program at Evander Childs High School found metal detectors at student entrances effective, especially as to guns. Among New York City's dozen more public schools deemed most violent, Roosevelt was among the first dozen more to get metal detectors. New York City's homicide rate peaked in 1990.

Internal dilemmas

Able to sneak some metal weapons into school past metal detectors, Roosevelt students faced threats riding public transportation to school. Via the 46th Precinct's territory, Roosevelt's students would sustain the specter of premeditated but random slashings for gang initiations. Versus many other high schools' students, Roosevelt's had been more greatly beset by the specter of AIDS. All of Roosevelt's students lived below the poverty line, while nearly one in three, speaking English as a second language, needed help learning English. Or a student could enter Roosevelt unable to read at all, and, once there, soon cease attending.

Some students kept attending Roosevelt, but barely involved themselves in the schoolwork. Often failing to graduate in four years, or even in five years as "superseniors", some became "ultraseniors", perhaps still Roosevelt students at age 21, when nongraduating students are dropped by the school system. Among New York state's worst schools, Theodore Roosevelt High School was placed on the New York State Department of Education's list failing schools. New York City educational bureaucracy—the appointed seven members of the city's Board of Education, its hired chancellor of the city's schools, the 32 school districts' elected school boards, and the appointed superintendent of each school district—shielded anyone from blame for such deterioration.

Vigorous leadership

In 1992, Thelma B Baxter—whose mother had been Roosevelt's valedictorian in 1923—became Roosevelt's principal. Baxter extended class hours, and ensured that students retained the same teacher in a subject for both semesters during a school year. Though finding "100 percent" of the students poor, she found parents' problems no excuse for staff allowing students to do poorly. Despite having "basically the same school", Baxter ensured that they "put tougher standards in place". Though Baxter was "pugnacious" like the school's namesake, students often stopped by her office to talk, seek advice, or embrace, and Baxter frequently walked the halls while accosting students, newly prohibited from wearing hats inside the building. In a four-year span, Roosevelt students taking the math Regents exam rose from some 200 to over 500.

In January 1996, after three years of rising attendance, test scores, and graduation rate, Theodore Roosevelt High School left the state education department's list of failing schools, and Baxter was the subject of a New York Times editorial. During the next two years, the suspension rate fell some 50%. In September 1997, Baxter had begun "moral and efficacy" seminars where freshmen were shown videos and discussed issues of school attendance and right versus wrong. Roosevelt also began a "Saturday Institute" where some 500 middle-school students and their parents attended workshops and tutoring to help prepare for high school. At Mayor Rudy Giuliani's 1998 initiative to push students in high school beyond five years into night or weekend schools, Baxter pointed out the particular challenges that her students face—such as language barriers and parents returning with them to the Caribbean for significant periods—and asserted that she preferred to keep underperforming students in a "caring atmosphere".

Expanding partnerships

In the early 1990s, Williams College, often ranked America's best liberal arts college, began an exchange program with Roosevelt. Taken from Roosevelt's honors program, and chaperoned by English teacher Frank Brown, select students periodically visited Williams' campus, and, demonstrating commitment to the program, then graduating from Roosevelt, received full scholarships to Williams. Meanwhile, in late 1998, coached by Frank Brown, Roosevelt's soccer team vied against Martin Luther King High School's in the championship game of Public Schools Athletic League (PSAL). During it, Roosevelt learned and immediately alerted PSAL that two of King's star players were ineligible, having played in Nigeria too many high-school seasons. After the game, Roosevelt sought not the 1998 boys soccer title but annulment of King's holding it. Denying the petitions, PSAL maintained that petitions must be filed before a game, a response that coach Brown and principal Baxter found unjust.

In September 1998, to implement at Roosevelt an afterschool program, The After-School Corporation had granted $200 thousand to Phipps Houses, which hired singer Russell Glover, once of the Boys Choir of Harlem, to create and direct it: Superior Effort Afterschool Liberates (SEAL). From 3pm to 5pm, SEAL included 14 activities involving about 400 of Roosevelt's roughly 4000 students. The highlight, as though inspired by Las Vegas and hip hop, was the "Russell Glover Show", three hours long, a revue—including break dancing, fashion show, gymnastics, karate, singing, and other performances, mostly by SEAL participants—that by April 1999, its fourth show, held in Roosevelt's gymnasium, drew a crowd of some 1000 Roosevelt students. A ninth grader remarked, "This show gets kids motivated. It gives you the idea that you can do something with your life". Finding "crossover value" in SEAL activities, Baxter commented, "To prepare to be academically successful, kids need to develop their bodies and minds". Actually, Glover mostly prepared students for job training or hunting. During Baxter's span at Roosevelt, its community partnerships rose from four to thirty. Although Roosevelt still lagged behind other New York City high schools, Roosevelt's rapid and remarkable turnaround brought Baxter a citywide and then national acclaim.

Giuliani mayorship

On the evening of November 8, 1995, some 900 people, mostly parents, gathered for about two hours at Theodore Roosevelt High School, where New York City's newly appointed chancellor of schools, Rudy Crew, gave the first of a series of talks in all five city boroughs about Crew's vision for the school system of a little over one million students. Crew vowed that his chancellorship would be "about children first, foremost, finally, and forever". Meanwhile, amid reports of school problems or bureaucratic corruption or incompetence, the city's mayor, Rudy Giuliani, would scorn the city's Board of Education, and once added, "This is why control of schools should be given to the mayor". By 1999, several cities, including Cleveland, Chicago, and Boston, had given mayors more control of schools, but in that year's budget speech, Giuliani instead lamented, "The whole system should be blown up".

In summer 1999, New York City public schools' Chancellor Rudy Crew approved the appointment of Theodore Roosevelt High School's principal Thelma Baxter to a new position—superintendent of School District 5—in central Harlem. Seeking to mimic and expand her Roosevelt successes, Baxter left Roosevelt, which in 2000—graduating 33% of its students in their fourth years versus 50% as the citywide average—returned to the New York State Department of Education's list of failing schools. In 2001, that department ordered the school, also considered violent, to begin shutdown. The last freshman class entered in 2002, and would yield the final graduates in 2006. While several small high schools opened within the building, Roosevelt occupied only the first and fourth of the four stories above ground, but hosted about double the citywide average of reported incidents, ranging from loitering to felony assault.

Bloomberg mayorship

In January 2004, apparently finding the city's Department of Education too nonchalant, Mayor Michael Bloomberg asserted responsibility for the city's generally underperforming public schools, and announced that some, newly identified as "impact" schools, would get extra police presence. That month, a riot in Roosevelt's suspension center prompted call to list the school among the "Dangerous Dozen". Yet the school's violence had recently fallen, then resurged once the Department of Education placed the suspension center—intended for up to 20 students suspended from various Bronx high schools for infractions ranging from vandalism to striking teachers—on the fourth floor of Roosevelt's building, but reduced its number of security staff. Still, during January, Roosevelt hosted 110 "criminal and disorderly incidents", although it was often unmentioned that many were committed in Roosevelt by students of other high schools.

In April 2004, Mayor Bloomberg announced the addition of Roosevelt, and three other schools, to the list of "impact" schools, especially violent, to get extra police presence. Over a year later, in June 2005, Roosevelt's student body down to some 1500 students and its building newly housing several small schools, Mayor Bloomberg visited Roosevelt to announce before the news media that six schools, including Roosevelt, that had been made "impact" schools subsequently experienced sharp falls in crime. Others, too, found things calmer in the Roosevelt building, where, during that one year, felony assaults dropped from five to one, misdemeanor assaults from thirteen to six, and sexual assaults from three to zero. Meanwhile, the movement toward small schools, apparently performing better, gained favor by mayor Bloomberg's administration. Widely troubled, New York City's large high schools sustained a general policy of shutdown. On June 30, 2006, Roosevelt's final class graduated at the lowest rate among New York City's large high schools, 3%. Thereupon, the Theodore Roosevelt High School closed.