Stuyvesant High School is a public college-preparatory specialized high school in Manhattan, New York City, United States. The school specializes in developing talent in math, science, and technology. Operated by the New York City Department of Education, the school offers tuition-free, advanced classes to New York City high school students.
Stuyvesant High School was established in 1904 as an all-boys school in the East Village of Lower Manhattan. Starting in 1934, admission for all applicants was contingent on passing an entrance examination. In 1969, the school began permanently accepting female students. In 1992, Stuyvesant High School moved to its current location at Battery Park City to accommodate more students. The old campus houses several smaller high schools and charter schools.
Admission to Stuyvesant involves passing the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test, required for the New York City Public Schools system. Every March, approximately 800 to 850 applicants with the highest SHSAT scores are accepted out of about 30,000 students who apply to Stuyvesant, an acceptance rate of less than 3%.
Extracurricular activities at the school include a math team, a speech and debate team, a robotics team, a yearly theater competition, and various student publications, including a newspaper, a yearbook, and literary magazines. Stuyvesant has educated four Nobel laureates. Notable alumni include former United States attorney general Eric Holder, physicists Brian Greene and Lisa Randall, economists Robert Fogel, Jesse Shapiro, and Thomas Sowell, mathematician Paul Cohen, chemist Roald Hoffmann, biologist Eric Lander, Oscar-winning actor James Cagney, comedian Billy Eichner, and chess grandmaster Robert Hess.
History
Planning In 1887, the then independent city of Brooklyn's Superintendent of Schools, William Henry Maxwell, wrote a report about the need to construct technical and science-oriented secondary schools in Brooklyn and throughout New York state. This would follow other examples of specialized high schools, such as the Baltimore Manual Training School, now the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. The municipal architect and engineer C. B. J. Snyder, who designed many of the city's public school buildings, had repeatedly mentioned a need for more basic mathematical and scientific preparation in New York's growing numbers of public secondary schools in the late 19th century. The first such school in the city was Manual Training High School in Brooklyn, which opened in 1893. By 1899, now positioned as the newly-formed City of Greater New York's Superintendent of Public Schools, Maxwell was advocating for another specialized high school across the river in the newly established borough of Manhattan.
In January 1903, Maxwell and Snyder submitted a report to the New York City Board of Education in which they suggested creating a school in Manhattan. The Board of Education approved the plans in April 1904. It suggested that the school occupy a plot on East 15th Street, west of First Avenue. But that plot did not yet contain a school building, and so the new school was initially housed within Public School #47's former building at 225 East 23rd Street. The Board of Education also wrote that the new school would be "designated as the Stuyvesant High School, as being reminiscent of the locality". Stuyvesant Square, Stuyvesant Street, and later Stuyvesant Town (which was built in 1947) are all near the proposed 15th Street school building. All these locations were named after Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch Director (governor) of New Netherland (and its major port town of New Amsterdam) and owner of the area's Stuyvesant Farm. The appellation of a specific historical name was selected to avoid confusion with Brooklyn's earlier Manual Training High School.
Opening and boys' school Stuyvesant High School opened in September 1904 as Manhattan's first specialized high school. At the time of its opening, it had 155 students and 12 teachers.
At first, the school provided a core curriculum of "English, Latin, modern languages, history, mathematics, physics, chemistry, [and] music", as well as a physical education program and a more specialized track of "woodworking, metalworking, mechanical drawing, [and] freehand drawing". But in June 1908, Maxwell announced that the school's core curriculum would be separated for the rest and that a discrete trade school would operate in the Stuyvesant building in the evening. Thereafter, Stuyvesant became renowned for excellence in math and science. In 1909, eighty percent of the school's alumni went to college; other high schools sent only 25% to 50% of their graduates to college.
By 1919, officials were restricting admission based on academic achievement. Stuyvesant implemented a double session plan in 1919 to accommodate the rising number of students: some students would attend in the morning and others in the afternoon and early evening. All students studied a full set of courses. These double sessions ran until spring 1957. The school implemented a system of entrance examinations in 1934. The examination program, developed with the assistance of Columbia University, was expanded in 1938 to include the newly founded Bronx High School of Science.
Co-educational school In 1967, Alice de Rivera sued the Board of Education, alleging that she had been banned from taking Stuyvesant's entrance exam because of her gender. The lawsuit was decided in her favor, and Stuyvesant was required to accept female students. The first female students were accepted in September 1969, when Stuyvesant offered admission to 14 girls and enrolled 12 of them. The next year, Stuyvesant accepted 223 female students. By 2015, girls were 43% of the student body.
In 1972, the New York State Legislature passed the Hecht–Calandra Act, which designated four citywide selective specialized public high schools in New York City—Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Technical High School, Bronx Science, and the High School of Music & Art (now Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School)—as specialized high schools of New York City. The act called for a uniform exam to be administered for admission to Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and Stuyvesant. The exam, named the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT), tested the mathematical and verbal abilities of students who were applying to any of the specialized high schools. The only exception was for applicants to the music and arts program at LaGuardia High School, who were accepted by audition rather than examination.
September 11 attacks The current school building in Battery Park City is about from the site of the World Trade Center, which was destroyed in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The school was evacuated during the attack. Although the smoke cloud from the World Trade Center temporarily covered the building, there was no structural damage, and there were no reports of physical injuries. Less than an hour after the collapse of the second World Trade Center tower, concern over a bomb threat at the school prompted an evacuation of the surrounding area, as reported live on the Today show. 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 severe congestion at Brooklyn Tech, and required the students to attend in two shifts, with Stuyvesant students attending in the evening. Normal classes resumed on October 9.
Nine alumni were killed in the World Trade Center attack.* On October 2, 2001, the school newspaper, The Spectator, ran a 24-page section with student photos, reflections, and stories. On November 20, the magazine was distributed for free to the greater metropolitan area, enclosed within 830,000 copies of The New York Times. In the months after the attacks, Annie Thoms, 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 September 11 and compile them into a collection of monologues. Thoms published these monologues as With Their Eyes: September 11—The View from a High School at Ground Zero.
Later history During the 2003–04 school year, Stuyvesant celebrated the 100th anniversary of its founding with a full year of activities. Events included a procession from the 15th Street building to the Chambers Street one, a meeting of the National Consortium for Specialized Secondary Schools of Mathematics, Science and Technology, an all-class reunion, and visits and speeches from some notable alumni.
In the 21st century, keynote graduation speakers have included Attorney General Eric Holder (2001), United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan (2004), and comedian Conan O'Brien (2006).
Buildings 15th Street building
In August 1904, the Board of Education authorized municipal architect and engineer Snyder to design a new facility for Stuyvesant High School at 15th Street. The new high school structure was designed in the then popular Beaux-Arts and Neoclassical / Classical Revival architecture for its grand imposing style. It was shaped like the letter "H", with two interior light courts; the shape also allowed natural light to illuminate more inside windows and parts of the building. The cornerstone for the new building was laid in September 1905. About $1.5 million was spent on constructing the school, including $600,000 for the monumental stone exterior alone. It was considered one of the most expensive public buildings or school structures ever built up to that time in New York, and was a point of civic pride in the early 20th century. In 1907, the Stuyvesant High School moved to the new building on 15th Street. The new building had a capacity of 2,600 students, more than double that of the existing previous temporary school building of the last few years at 23rd Street. It contained 25 classrooms devoted to skilled industrial trades such as joinery, as well as 53 regular classrooms and a 1,600-seat auditorium.
A half-century later, during the 1950s, the building underwent a $2 million renovation to update its classrooms, shops, libraries, and cafeterias.
Unfortunately through the 1970s and 1980s, when New York City municipal government and especially the public schools system, in general, were marked by violence, vandalism / graffiti and low academic grades among their students, Stuyvesant High still had an excellent academic reputation for being a top-notch public high school, and was still graduating well-prepared alumni who became highly accomplished. But the 1905–1907 school building was deteriorating due to overuse and lack of proper maintenance. A New York Times daily newspaper exposé found that the building had "held out into old age with minimal maintenance and benign neglect until its peeling paint, creaking floorboards and antiquated laboratories became an embarrassment." The five-story building could not cater adequately to the several thousand students, leading the New York City Board of Education to move the school to a new building in Battery Park City, near lower Manhattan's Financial District. The 15th Street building remains in use as the "Old Stuyvesant Campus", housing three smaller schools: the Institute for Collaborative Education, the High School for Health Professions and Human Services, and lower grades of PS 226.
Current building