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:
“As God is my witness, they’re not going to lick me. I’m going to live through this and when it’s all over, I’ll never be hungry again. No, nor any of my folks. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill, as God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again!”
—Sidney Howard (1891–1939)
“The United States is the only great nation whose government is operated without a budget. The fact is to be the more striking when it is considered that budgets and budget procedures are the outgrowth of democratic doctrines and have an important part in developing the modern constitutional rights.... The constitutional purpose of a budget is to make government responsive to public opinion and responsible for its acts.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“Our domestic problems are for the most part economic. We have our enormous debt to pay, and we are paying it. We have the high cost of government to diminish, and we are diminishing it. We have a heavy burden of taxation to reduce, and we are reducing it. But while remarkable progress has been made in these directions, the work is yet far from accomplished.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“School divides life into two segments, which are increasingly of comparable length. As much as anything else, schooling implies custodial care for persons who are declared undesirable elsewhere by the simple fact that a school has been built to serve them.”
—Ivan Illich (b. 1926)
“I know of no one so patient and determined to have the good of you. It is almost friendship, such plain and human dealing.... He has naturalized and humanized New York for me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)