Background
The school, which serves grades 9 through 12, is a part of the New York City Department of Education, and has an overall 59% graduation rate which includes special education students and ESL (English as a Second Language) students. The highest graduation rates in the past few years have been the class of 2010 with 70% and the class of 2011 with 89%.
Long Island City High School has a significant population of first-generation immigrants as students.
The school also has award winning courses in music and culinary arts. The Music department consist of various levels of strings, orchestra, band, and choir. The band and choir have both been recognized by NYSSMA, the New York State Music Association, as well as individual students in classes such as Opera and strings. The Celebrity Chef Bobby Flay has visited this school to shoot his show Throwdown with Bobby Flay.
Originally, Long Island City High school had a total of 13 periods, which was reduced to 12 on the 2006-2007 school year, and has currently been reduced to 11 periods.
The former principal, William Bassell, has won the Americans for the Arts award and several other awards for this support of the arts in education. He has opened the new LIC building, which has 2 large gyms, a dance studio, a custom made culinary cooking kitchen for cooking classes, and an Olympic sized swimming pool.
Overcrowding in Long Island City H.S has caused several issues. This overcrowded school is a nest of all types of things such as increased class sizes and locker room delays. The overcrowding also forces some academic classes to be held in computer labs.
Long Island City High School has over 18 AP Classes, Honors Program, Opera and Orchestra, Dance and Theatre, Visual Arts, and over eight Foreign Languages. It also has over 20 multicultural and interdisciplinary clubs, over 20 teams and a growing ARISTA (National Honor Society) chapter.
The school is divided into PLE's (Personal Learning Environments)which help the students in keeping them with specific groups of teachers but those trends are often broken when students end up with classes in other PLE's, for example a child in a certain academy getting an Honors/AP course would grant them a class in that academy and broadening the teachers they are exposed to. As of the 2010-11 school year the schools change to appointing Mr.Vladimir Hurych as acting principal and shortly after the title was granted to Mrs. Maria Mamo-Vaccela, the academies took on new names such as Nova, Aurora, Quasar, Mariner, Voyager, and more as the school took a new approach to education in finding the facts/ main ideas in every possible subject as well as the importance of Non-fiction reading.
Long Island City High School is also a testing center for the Specialized High Schools Admission Test (SHSAT).
Read more about this topic: Long Island City High School
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