Stuyvesant High School Totally Explained

Everything about Stuyvesant High School totally explained

Stuyvesant High School (IPA: /ˈstаɪvɛsənt/), commonly referred to as Stuy (IPA: /ˈstаɪ/), is a New York City public high school that specializes in mathematics and science. It is arguably one of the most competitive public high schools in the United States, sending more students to some of the nation's most prestigious universities than most other public or private schools. The school opened in 1904 on Manhattan's East Side and moved to a new building in Battery Park City in 1992. The school is noted for its strong academic programs, having produced many notable alumni including four Nobel laureates. U.S. News and World Report ranked it fifteenth in their 2007 list of America's best "Gold-Medal" high schools.
Together with Brooklyn Technical High School and Bronx High School of Science, Stuyvesant is one of the three original academic Specialized High Schools of New York City. Operated by the New York City Department of Education, the trio are open to New York City residents and charge no tuition. Admission to each is by competitive examination only, of which Stuyvesant has the highest cutoff score. A long-standing friendly rivalry between Stuyvesant and Bronx Science exists over the Intel Science Talent Search, with either school claiming dominance over the other at various times.
Established as a manual trade school for boys, Stuyvesant became coeducational in 1969. Upon the construction of its Battery Park City building, the facilities for girls became on par with those for boys.

History

Stuyvesant High School is named after Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of New Netherland before the colony was transferred to England in 1664.
   The school was established in 1904 as a manual training school for boys, hosting 155 students and 12 teachers. In 1907, it moved from its original location at 225 East 23rd Street to a building designed by C. B. J. Snyder at 345 East 15th Street, where it remained for 85 years. Its reputation for excellence in math and science continued to grow, and enrollment was restricted based on scholastic achievement starting in 1919.
   The school went on a double session plan in 1919 to accommodate the rising number of students. Some students attended in the morning and others in the afternoon and early evening. All students studied a full set of courses. Double sessions ran until 1956.
   In 1934, the school implemented a system of entrance examinations. The examination program was later expanded to include the newly founded Bronx High School of Science, and was developed with the assistance of Columbia University. During the 1950s, the building underwent a $2 million renovation to update its classrooms, shops, libraries and cafeterias.
   In 1969, 14 girls were admitted to Stuyvesant and 12 enrolled at the start of September, marking the school's first co-educational year. Now, approximately 43% of students are female.
   In 1972, Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, Stuyvesant, and The High School of Music & Art (now Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts) were chosen by the New York State Legislature as specialized high schools of New York City. The Hecht-Calandra act called for a uniform exam to be administered for admission to Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science and Stuyvesant High School. The exam, named the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT), tested students in math and verbal abilities. Admission to LaGuardia High School is by audition rather than examination, in keeping with its artistic mission. The list of schools using the SHSAT has since grown to include all of New York's specialized high schools except LaGuardia High School, where entry is by audition rather than examination. The test score necessary for admission to Stuyvesant has consistently been higher than that needed for admission to the other schools using the test. Admission is currently based on an individual's score on the examination and his or her pre-submitted ranking of Stuyvesant among the other specialized schools. Each year, about 26,000 of New York City's eighth-graders sit for the test. Ninth and rising tenth graders are also eligible to take the test for enrollment, though far fewer students are admitted this way.
   According to Article 12 of New York education law, "Admissions to the Bronx High School of Science, Stuyvesant High School, and Brooklyn Technical High School shall be solely and exclusively by taking a competitive, objective, and scholastic achievement examination, which shall be open to each and every child in the city of New York." The current admission policy is available from the NYC Department of Education.

School facilities

By the 1980s, the East 15th Street building was no longer a quality educational facility by modern standards. The five-story building was also overwhelmed by the several thousand students. So The New York City Board of Education secured an agreement with the Battery Park City Authority for a new building, and construction began in 1989. The new ten-floor building, located near lower Manhattan's financial district, cost about $148 million and included 65 classrooms, about 450 computers on 13 networks, 7 pairs of escalators, various indoor sporting facilities including two gymnasiums and a pool built to Public Schools Athletic League standards, a theater with acoustics and lighting to accommodate music and drama productions, two lecture halls with movable partitions, a skylit cafeteria overlooking the Hudson River, 12 science laboratories (including a molecular biology lab and an analytical chemistry lab) and special shops for instruction in ceramics, photography, wood, plastics, metal work, robotics and energy studies. One room, called the Museum Room, was built as a replica of a room in the 15th Street Stuyvesant building as a request by students, with desks, chairs, a table and blackboard brought from there, as well as paint and flooring in its style. The room was dedicated to teacher Dr. A. Edward Stefanacci, who died in 1993. The school's library has a capacity of 40,000 volumes and overlooks Battery Park City.
   The New York City Department of Education reports that public per student spending at Stuyvesant is slightly lower than the city average. Shortly after the new building was completed, the $10 million TriBeCa Bridge was built to allow students to enter the building without having to cross the busy West Street.
   The new school building was designed to be fully compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and is listed as such by the New York City Department of Education. As a result, the building is one of the 5 additional sites of P721M, a school for older (aged 15–21) students with multiple disabilities and mental retardation.
   In 1997, the eastern end of the mathematics floor, where the math department office is located, was dedicated to Dr. Richard Rothenberg, the math department chairman who had died from a sudden heart attack earlier that year. The Rothenberg memorial, commissioned in his honor, is a wall made up of 49 glass boxes, each featuring a mathematical concept. The glass boxes are reminiscent of Mnemonics public artwork, but are not part of it.

Mnemonics (public artwork)

During construction, the Battery Park City Authority in conjunction with the Percent for Art Program of the City of New York, the Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York City Board of Education commissioned Mnemonics, an artwork by public artists Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel. Four hundred hollow glass blocks were dispersed randomly from the basement to the tenth floor of the new Stuyvesant High School building. Each block contains relics that are evidence of geographical, natural, cultural and social worlds, from antiquity to the present time.
The blocks are set into the hallway walls and scattered throughout the building. Each block is inscribed with a brief description of its contents or context. The items displayed include a section of the Great Wall of China, fragments of the Mayan pyramids, leaves from the sacred Bo tree, water from the Nile and Ganges Rivers, a Revolutionary War button, pieces of the 15th Street Stuyvesant building and of monuments around the world, various chemical compounds, and memorabilia from each of the 88 years' history of the 15th Street building. As an ongoing work, empty blocks were installed, to be filled with items chosen by the 88 graduating classes following its installation, up through 2080. The installation received the Award for Excellence in Design from the Art Commission of the City of New York.

Academics

Stuyvesant students undertake a college preparatory curriculum that includes four years of English, history, and laboratory-based sciences (chemistry and physics are required), three years of mathematics (most students opt for four) and foreign language, a semester each of introductory art, music, health, and computer science, and two lab-based technology courses. Several exemptions from technology education exist for seniors.
   Stuyvesant offers students a broad selection of elective courses. Some of the more unusual offerings include robotics, physics of music, astronomy, introduction to plasma physics, and the mathematics of financial markets. Most students take calculus, and the school offers math courses through differential equations and linear algebra. A year of technical drawing used to be required; students learned how to draft by hand in its first semester and how to draft using a computer (CAD) in the second. Now, students take a one-semester class called Technology Graphic Communications (equivalent to the former year of drafting), and a semester of introductory computer science in order to introduce the mainly science-oriented students to computer programming early in their careers.
   Students can choose from 31 Advanced Placement courses to earn college credits; a few are thus able to start college as sophomores.
   Computer science enthusiasts can take two additional computer programming courses after the completion of Advanced Placement computer science: systems level programming and computer graphics. There is also a 2 year computer networking sequence which can earn students Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) certification.
   Stuyvesant's foreign language offerings rival those of many colleges, including French, Spanish, German, Latin, Hebrew, Japanese, and Italian. In 2001, Korean was added as a result of student and parent requests. The school's Muslim Student Association was successful in raising funds to support courses in Arabic, which began in 2005. Both Arabic and Korean are offered as electives.
   Stuyvesant's Biology and Geo-science department offers courses in molecular biology (a course sequence comprised of a molecular science class in the Fall and a molecular genetics class in the Spring), human physiology, medical ethics, medical and veterinary diagnosis, human disease, anthropology and sociobiology, vertebrate zoology, laboratory techniques, medical human genetics, botany, the molecular basis of cancer, nutrition science, and psychology. The Chemistry and Physics department offers organic chemistry, physical chemistry, astronomy, engineering mechanics, and electronics.
   Stuyvesant has contributed to the education of several Nobel laureates, winners of the Fields Medal and the Wolf Prize, and a host of other accomplished alumni. It consistently leads the nation in the number of National Merit Scholarships awarded and regularly trades off the leading position in the number of Intel Science Talent Search Semi-Finalists and Finalists with Bronx Science.
   Stuyvesant, along with other similar schools, has regularly been excluded from Newsweek's annual list of the Top 100 Public High Schools. The 2006-05-08 issue states the reason as being, "because so many of their students score well above average on the SAT and ACT." US News & World Report, however, included Stuyvesant on its list of "Best High Schools" published in December 2007.
   Before the revision of the SAT, Stuyvesant graduates had an average score of 1408 (685 verbal, 723 math).
   According to a September 2002 high school ranking by Worth magazine, 3.67% of Stuyvesant students went on to attend Harvard, Princeton, and Yale Universities, ranking it as the 9th top public high school in the United States and 120th among all schools, public or private. In December 2007, The Wall Street Journal studied the freshman classes at eight selective colleges (Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Williams College, Pomona College, Swarthmore College, U. Chicago, and Johns Hopkins), and reported that Stuvesant sent 67, or 9.9% of its 674 seniors, to them. cricket, football, The Stuyvesant Cross Country team was Public Schools Athletic League (PSAL) City Champions in 2004, 2005 and 2007, and have been Manhattan Borough Triple Crown Champions since 1999. The Stuyvesant Boys Swimming Team, the Pirates, have been PSAL City Champions consecutively since 2000 and Opens champions since 1995. The girls soccer team, the Mimbas, brought home the City Championship title in 2001, 2004, and 2005, despite a severe lack of practice space and lack of a home field. In 2005 the Stuyvesant Fencing team won the PSAL City Championship. Stuyvesant is also a powerhouse in fencing with a string of city championships from 1986 through 1989 and again as recently as 2005. In September 2007 the Stuyvesant football team were granted a home field at Pier 40. Stuyvesant does not, however, have a track, baseball field, or tennis court, although the new building does have a pool.
   Unlike most American high schools, most sports teams at Stuyvesant have their own name, such as the Lemurs (boys gymnastics), Peglegs (football, Boy's lacrosse and bowling), Huskies (Girl's Lacrosse) Penguins (girls swimming), Pirates (boys swimming), Ballers (boys soccer), Mimbas (girls soccer), Vixens (girls varsity volleyball), Lobsters (girls tennis), Hitmen (baseball), Flying Dutchmen (hockey) and Spartans (wrestling and Roller Hockey). These names tend to change with time.

Student government

The student body of Stuyvesant is represented by the Stuyvesant Student Union,

Improving student life by promoting and managing extracurricular activities (clubs and publications), and by organizing out-of-school activity such as city excursions or fund-raisers;
Providing a voice to the student body in all discussion of school policy with the administration.

Clubs and publications

Stuyvesant offers clubs, publications, teams and other opportunities under a system similar to that of many colleges. It hosts over 200 clubs ranging from The Thinkers (philosophy) club, to the Photography Club. The sheer number of clubs at the school is due to Stuyvesant's relatively free policy of "student rule". Most clubs are entirely student run, requiring only a Faculty Advisor to maintain their existence. One of the best examples of this policy is the Stuyvesant Model UN club, which is one of the largest clubs in the school. The club attends as many as 6 Model UN Conferences each year, held at various Colleges across the Northeast. The club also hosts StuyMUNC, an annual conference organized and run almost entirely by the students. Stuyvesant also has a very prestigious Junior State of America program (a political debate club). The Stuyvesant Theater Community puts on three student-run productions a year (a fall musical, a winter drama, and a spring comedy) as well as a one-act festival and several smaller studio productions. Key Club International also has a branch at Stuyvesant, with over 200 members making it one of the largest clubs in the school.

The Spectator

The Spectator is Stuyvesant's official school newspaper. It contains eleven sections: news, features, op-ed, arts & entertainment, sports, photography, art, layout, copy, business, and web. Most departments are headed by at least two editors, all of whom encompass the editorial board of the paper. The editorial board meets daily in the Spectator journalism class and is headed by the Editor in Chief and Managing Editor. At the start of their term, the Editor in Chief and Managing Editor select four editors to be members of the Managing Board, a group that advises the Editor in Chief and Managing Editor on matters relating to the paper. There are over 250 total staff members who help to produce the bi-weekly publication. At the beginning of the fall and spring terms, there are recruitments, but interested students may join at any time. The Spectator is independent from the school, but it remains a prime news source for students, teachers, and administrators. The Spectator, founded in 1915, is one of Stuyvesant's oldest publications. It has a long-standing connection with its older namesake, Columbia University's Columbia Daily Spectator, and it has been recognized by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism's Columbia Scholastic Press Association on several occasions, most recently in 2002.

The Stuyvesant Standard

Founded in 2001, The Stuyvesant Standard is a bi-weekly newspaper published by Stuyvesant students for the community in and around the school. It covers school news as well as current events, and contains "interest sections" such as Business and Science alongside the standard departments of Opinions, Sports, and Arts & Entertainment. The Stuyvesant Standard is distributed within Stuyvesant and throughout the surrounding community.

The Voice

The Voice was founded in the 1973–1974 academic year as an independent publication only loosely sanctioned by school officials. The administration refused to permit The Voice to distribute the questionnaire, and the Board of Education refused to intervene, believing that "irreparable psychological damage" would be occasioned on some of the students receiving it. brought a First Amendment challenge to this decision in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in front of Judge Constance Baker Motley. ordered the Board of Education to come up with an arrangement permitting the distribution of the survey to the juniors and seniors.
However, Judge Motley's ruling was overturned on appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Judge J. Edward Lumbard, joined by Judge Murray Gurfein and over an impassioned dissent by Judge Walter R. Mansfield, held that the distribution of the questionnaires was properly disallowed by the administration as there was "a substantial basis for defendants' belief that distribution of the questionnaire would result in significant emotional harm to a number of students throughout the Stuyvesant population."

Other publications

Caliper, Stuyvesant's biannual literary magazine. Caliper is one of the oldest high school literary publications in the nation, and along with monthly open mic sessions, helps the Stuyvesant literary community flourish in an environment focusing on math and science.

Indicator, the Stuyvesant yearbook.

Math Survey, the annual Math Department publication. Many of Stuyvesant's notable mathematicians were first published in Math Survey.

Inspiration Magazine, an art and literary publication sponsored by the Music and Arts Department.

The Broken Escalator, a humor publication, styled after The Onion, featuring joke articles about Stuyvesant.

The Biomed Times, the annual journal of recent biological developments.

Academic teams

Stuyvesant's academic teams include its nationally recognized Speech and Debate team, Quiz Bowl, chess, Science Olympiad, and math, which regularly compete successfully at major regional, national, and—at least in the case of the math team—international tournaments. A FIRST Robotics team was founded in 2000. Stuyvesant also has a Model United Nations team, a Junior State of America chapter, and a Model Congress team which competes at regional colleges. The Model United Nations team hosts StuyMUNC, an annual conference which takes place at Stuyvesant.

SING!

The annual theater competition known as SING! pits seniors, juniors, and "soph-frosh" (freshmen and sophomores working together) against each other in a race to put on the best performance. Started in 1947 at Midwood High School in Brooklyn, SING! is a tradition at many New York City high schools. At Stuyvesant, SING! started as a small event in 1973 and has grown to a huge school-wide event—in 2005, nearly 1,000 students participated. The entire production is written, produced, and funded by students. Their involvement ranges from being members of the production's casts, choruses, or tech crews to Irish dance, Step, Bollywood, Hip-Hop, Swing, Ballet, Jazz or Latin dance groups. SING! begins in late January to February and culminates in final performances on three nights in March/April.

Student body

For most of the 20th century, the student body at Stuyvesant was heavily Jewish. A significant influx of Asian students began in the 1970s. For the 2006–2007 academic year, the student body was approximately 62 percent Asian American and 32 percent Caucasian, with Blacks and Hispanics each constituting roughly 5 percent of the population. Stuyvesant possesses a disproportionate amount of historical minorities in comparison to national and local population distributions.
A number of students take preparatory courses offered by private companies such as Princeton Review and Kaplan, in order to perform better on the SHSAT, often leaving those unable to afford such classes—often ethnic, non-Asian minorities—at a disadvantage. To bridge this gap and boost minority admissions, the Board of Education started the Math Science Institute (MSI), a free program to prepare students for the admissions test. MSI students attend preparatory classes at Stuyvesant from the summer after 6th grade until the 8th grade exam.

Stuyvesant and 9/11

Stuyvesant is a quarter-mile (approx. 400 m) or a five-minute walk from the former site of the World Trade Center, which was destroyed on September 11, 2001. The school was evacuated during the attack. Although the smoke cloud coming from the World Trade Center engulfed the building at one point, there was no structural damage to the building, and there were no reports of physical injuries. When classes resumed on September 21, 2001, students were moved to Brooklyn Technical High School while the Stuyvesant building served as a base of operations for rescue and recovery workers. This caused serious congestion at Brooklyn Tech, and required the students to attend in two shifts. Normal classes resumed three weeks later on October 9th.
   Because Stuyvesant was close to Ground Zero, there were concerns of asbestos exposure. The US EPA indicated at that time that Stuyvesant was safe from asbestos, and conducted a thorough cleaning of the Stuyvesant building, but the Stuyvesant High School Parents' Association has contested that the assessment is inaccurate. Some problems, including former teacher Mark Bodenheimer's respiratory problems, have been reported—he accepted a transfer to The Bronx High School of Science after having difficulty continuing his work at Stuyvesant. Other isolated cases include Stuyvesant's 2002 Class President Amit Friedlander, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, who received local press coverage in September 2006 after he was diagnosed with cancer. While there have been other cases linked to the same dust cloud that emanated from ground zero, a spot precariously close to Stuyvesant, there's no definitive evidence that such cases have directly affected the Stuyvesant community. Stuyvesant students did spend a full year in the building before the theater and air systems were cleaned, however, and a group of Stuyvesant alumni is currently lobbying for health insurance as a result. Alan Wayne Friedlander (1967), Marina R. Gertsberg (1993), Aaron J. Horwitz (1994), David S. Lee (1982), Arnold A. Lim (1990), Gregory D. Richards (1988), Maurita Tam (1997) and Michael Warchola (1968). Richard Ben-Veniste (1960) was on the 9/11 Commission.
   On October 2 2001, the school paper, The Spectator, under Editor in Chief Jeff Orlowski and Faculty Advisor Holly Ojalvo, created a special 24-page full-color 9/11 insert containing student photos, reflections and stories. On November 20 2001, the magazine was distributed for free in 830,000 copies of The New York Times to the entire New York Greater Metropolitan Area.
   In the months after 9/11, Annie Thoms (1993), an English teacher at Stuyvesant and the theater adviser at the time, suggested that the students take accounts of staff and students' reactions during and after 9/11 and turn them into a series of monologues. Thoms then published these monologues as With Their Eyes: September 11th—The View from a High School at Ground Zero. Alexander Epstein of The Stuyvesant Standard contributed the section Out of the Blue to the book At Ground Zero: Young Reporters Who Were There Tell Their Stories.

Notable people

Notable scientists among Stuyvesant alumni include mathemetician Paul Cohen and genomic researcher Eric Lander. Other prominent alumni include entertainers such as Charlie's Angels star Lucy Liu, The Shawshank Redemption star Tim Robbins, and actor James Cagney.
Four Nobel laureates are also alumni of Stuyvesant, including:

Joshua Lederberg (1941) – Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1958

Robert Fogel (1944) – Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, 1993

Roald Hoffmann (1954) – Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1981

Richard Axel (1963) – Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2004 Author Frank McCourt taught English at Stuyvesant before the publication of his memoirs Angela's Ashes, 'Tis, and Teacher Man. Teacher Man's third section, titled Coming Alive in Room 205, is all about McCourt's time at Stuyvesant, and mentions a number of students and faculty.

In popular culture

Stuyvesant High School has been featured in television shows, films, books, and other media.
   The Stuyvesant High School building in Battery Park City was one of the main settings of the film Hackers, standing in for the fictional "Stanton High School". As in the film, the new building has no pool on the roof, despite a long history of seniors selling "rooftop pool passes" to new freshmen in the old building. It does, however, have a pool on the ground floor and a roof deck for its technology classes.
   A feature-length documentary, entitled Frontrunners, was made about the Student Union elections at Stuyvesant.
   The entrance to the high school is visible in the beginning of the music video for the Beastie Boys song Ch-Check It Out, as the three rappers walk on the TriBeCa Bridge. Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys also wears a red Stuyvesant High School Physical Education leader T-shirt in the video for (You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!). This has sparked a rumor that one or all of the Boys attended Stuyvesant. In fact, only the band's original drummer, Kate Schellenbach, did. Horovitz's much younger stepbrother Oliver also attended Stuyvesant.
   Stuyvesant has been chronicled in popular literature based in New York City. The Jonathan Lethem novels Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude are prominent examples of this trend. In the 1984 novel Warday, some former Stuyvesant students visit New York City after a limited nuclear exchange. In the 2003 novel The Russian Debutante's Handbook by Stuyvesant alumnus Gary Shteyngart, the protagonist Vladimir Girshkin attended a "science high school in Manhattan". The 2006 autobiographical young adult novel, The Notebook Girls, highlights the lives of four Stuyvesant students in the form of a journal. In August 2007, Simon & Schuster published 1985 alumnus and Washington Post reporter Alec Klein's book on Stuyvesant entitled A Class Apart: Prodigies, Pressure, and Passion Inside One of America's Best High Schools. In 2006, a controversial article about the different sexual orientations in Stuyvesant and how they represent a national trend appeared in New York magazine.

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