William Howard Taft High School was a public high school in southwest section of the Bronx, New York City. The school was operated by the New York City Department of Education.
Taft H.S. is located on Sheridan Avenue and 172nd Street in the Bronx. In the early 1970s, Taft H.S. earned a reputation as a "failing school" with many of the problems of other high schools in poor, marginalized neighborhoods in New York City.
Founded in the 1940s, Taft originally served the largely homogeneous population of the surrounding area. In the post-war years of the forties, fifties and sixties, famous graduates included director Stanley Kubrick, producer Jerry Weintraub and singers Eydie Gormé, Chuck Negron, and Luther Vandross.
Demographic changes in the sixties, the exodus of the homogeneous population, and the advent of specialized magnet schools brought about shifts in enrollment at Taft HS. During the Abraham Beame (1974–77) and Edward Koch (1978–89) Administrations, there was no priority given to the needs of the shifting demographics in the school community. City-wide, crime rates were high and unfavorable publicity further accelerated the decline of the school. Entering the 1990s, as a non-selective high school, it was unable to compete with the newer schools housing magnet programs that attracted prime students from throughout the borough. Crime intimidated vibrant young professionals from teaching at the high school. The danger was highlighted in May 1997, when Jonathan Levin, an English teacher at the school and the son of former Time Warner chairman Gerald M. Levin, was murdered by a former student in his Manhattan apartment.
Due to the above-mentioned demographic changes, of the 629 students attending Taft in the 1990s, the majority were Hispanic and African-American. On any given day, attendance hovered around 86%. The impoverished community, lacking in political clout or a cohesive PTA, was provided 10 truancy officers, rather than improved education strategies. The last graduating class of Taft High School was in June 2008. Within the same building, the previously identified "failing school" has been transformed into a series of small specialized high schools to meet modern career needs. The specialty schools are:
- Bronx High School for Medical Science
- Bronx High School of Business
- Bronx Collegiate Academy (formerly Bronx Expeditionary Learning High School)
- DreamYard Preparatory School
- Jonathan Levin High School for Media and Communications
- The Urban Assembly Academy for History and Citizenship for Young Men
Famous quotes containing the words howard, taft, high, school and/or york:
“I am in favor of helping the prosperity of all countries because, when we are all prosperous, the trade with each becomes more valuable to the other.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“People run away from the name subsidy. It is a subsidy. I am not afraid to call it so. It is paid for the purpose of giving a merchant marine to the whole country so that the trade of the whole country will be benefitted thereby, and the men running the ships will of course make a reasonable profit.... Unless we have a merchant marine, our navy if called upon for offensive or defensive work is going to be most defective.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“Good breeding ... differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“While most of today’s jobs do not require great intelligence, they do require greater frustration tolerance, personal discipline, organization, management, and interpersonal skills than were required two decades and more ago. These are precisely the skills that many of the young people who are staying in school today, as opposed to two decades ago, lack.”
—James P. Comer (20th century)
“I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)