Theodore Roosevelt High School (New York City)

The setting In the early 20th century, American educators sought to both expand and tailor schooling and to extend school enrollment into adolescence, newly seen as a prime opportunity to properly socialize youth, especially to assimilate the rapidly growing immigrant populations of cities. Helping to define, or even to create, this concept of adolescence as the transition from childhood to adulthood, high schools became venues where youth vied for control over identity, behavior, and allegiance, while the 19th century's esteem for Protestant respectability faded to the 20th century's emergent quests for intricate cosmopolitanism. The opening The Roosevelt High School was organized on November 14, 1918, from the commercial classes comprising a Morris High School annex conducted in PS 31, located at 144th Street and Mott Avenue, thereupon Roosevelt's location. The Bronx Board of Trade concluded, "It is probably due to the fact that its housing conditions are of the best that The Bronx for years has had the lowest death rate and the highest birth rate of any of the Boroughs". Throughout the 1920s, upscale apartments, highly coveted, rapidly went up along the Grand Concourse, and were promptly rented mostly by affluent doctors, lawyers, and businessmen. Up to some 80% of the Concourse's residents were Jews, the group leading the Bronx's rapid population growth, The building By 1922, Theodore Roosevelt High School had over 1460 commercial students, who were focusing on accounting or secretarial skills in programs ranging from one to four years. Roosevelt obtained a second annex on September 25, 1925 (in PS 70), a third annex on February 1, 1926 (in PS 73), and a fourth annex, but this one in Manhattan, on February 1, 1928 (in PS 39). Entering its ninth year, Roosevelt carried over 150 teachers and 4000 students. By 1920, however, there had already been calls to construct for Roosevelt its own building. In 1926, ground had been broken for the new building on May 18, and the building's cornerstone laid on November 17, on Fordham Road, several blocks east of its intersection with the Grand Concourse, and directly across the street from the sprawling campus, with Collegiate Gothic architecture, of Fordham University, founded in 1841. At 500 East Fordham Road, the building of Theodore Roosevelt High School opened in September, 1928. == Continuation: 1930s–60s ==

Depression Starting in 1929, the Great Depression damaged many livelihoods in the Bronx. And yet the borough's Democratic Party's boss, Edward J Flynn, had close ties with Franklin D Roosevelt—previously New York state's governor and a cousin of Theodore Roosevelt—who became US president in 1933. Reachable locally by trolleys, Covering two city blocks square, Theodore Roosevelt High School's building was among America's largest and best equipped with science laboratories, sewing and music rooms, automotive and woodworking shops. The Bronx was home, then, mostly to American whites, whereas Irish were the predominant minority group, while both Italians and Jews were increasing, and blacks were scarce. Having fled famine in the 19th century and commonly worked in America laying railroads, Roosevelt's home since 1928, was soon a Little Italy represented highly in Roosevelt's student body, students came from diverse neighborhoods, including the Bronx's affluent strip, the Grand Concourse. In 1930, holding a master's degree in education from Columbia University, Sarah L Delany, stymied in securing a job in her area of expertise, at last maneuvered to be hired before the school's administration had met her. On her first day of work, Delany was a shocking sight and awkward presence—a black woman teaching at a "white high school"—but, already hired through bureaucratic formality, was too difficult to release. From 1931 to 1947, some 80% of graduates from New York City high schools had been extracurricularly active, as in sports or clubs. Many parents, especially of recent immigration, wanted their daughters away from male peers altogether, a factor commonly important to Italians, comprising nearly 33% of Bay Ridge High School's students, many of whom commuted from a wide area since parents viewed this girls' high school as "safe", like a parochial school. Although Brooklyn's Bay Ridge section was mainly American white, as were some 25% of the high school's students, faculty may have encouraged universal involvement and prevented spontaneous ethnic segregation, as Italian girls and the few black girls alike were extracurricularly involved far more than elsewhere, a stark contrast from black boys at Roosevelt. With World War II's 1939 outbreak, curricula at American public schools were redirected toward the war effort. while children in onlooking crowds apprehended a connection to a world outside the Bronx. For many adults, including some who taught at Roosevelt, the 1945 death of President FDR—in the White House a dozen years while leading America through the Great Depression and World War II—severed a sense of continuity with the past. In 1947, opposing communism, the Catholic War Veterans of New York accused the city's Board of Education of aiding subversives by letting the communist group American Youth for Democracy hold meetings in Roosevelt's building, which was similarly used by diverse organizations. formed Dion and the Belmonts, whose members, lead singer Dion DiMucci, first tenor Angelo D'Aleo, second tenor Fred Milano, and baritone Carlo Mastrangelo, had all been Roosevelt students together. Meanwhile, during the 1950s, Cleveland Indians baseball player Rocky Colavito, born in the Bronx in 1933, inspired Cleveland fans' maxim ''Don't knock the Rock, seen as "everything a ballplayer should be". A Sporting News'' article of June 10, 1959, named him the American League player most likely to break Babe Ruth's record, 60 home runs in a season. Roosevelt students of the late 1960s included Ace Frehley, later the lead guitarist of Kiss, and Chazz Palminteri, it became Robert De Niro's directing debut. Frehley had attended a private Lutheran school, but, "too wild", was ejected, went to the public DeWitt Clinton High School, "a progressive place" in the Bronx, but was one of only a couple of students with long hair, refused to cut it, and was transferred to Roosevelt, where he focused on art courses, got bored, and dropped out, yet returned and graduated. Palminteri, too, had attended Clinton, but, disliking its being all male, transferred to Roosevelt, where this poor student, who got girls to do his homework, graduated in 1973 at age 21. Although later actor Jimmie Walker's diploma was from Clinton, he met its requirements in 1965 by attending night classes at Roosevelt, whose summer sessions, too, taught students of other high schools. == Deterioration: 1970s–80s ==

Drug culture During the 1950s, as US government's policy shifted Puerto Rico's economy from agriculture to manufacturing, many Puerto Ricans sought sustainable work by emigrating to New York City. After similar moves to New York, emigrant blacks from the American South and from the Caribbean increasingly emerged from poverty, a progress that slowed in the 1960s and halted by about 1970, however, amid rising stagflation and US government's focus on the Vietnam War. The view of schools as a collaborative effort emphasized agreement among workers, potentially in the educational bureaucracy for decades, whereas points of central importance in educating adolescents, each in high school for only a few years, fell off the agenda, dominated by the lowest common denominator—the adults' widest agreement. While many educational administrators and officials maneuvered to secure school jobs for their own families and friends, the students got insufficient attention. Although it takes a strong leader, perhaps unpopular, to turn schools around, voters may lack the attention or interest to vote accordingly.—adjacent westward of the 48th Precinct's jurisdiction, which contained Roosevelt High—was notoriously homicidal among New York City's 75 precincts. including police officers who aided drug tracking and menaced residents. Among the New York City schools deemed most violent, Roosevelt was among the first dozen more to get metal detectors. Internal dilemmas Some students figured out how to sneak metal weapons past Roosevelt's metal detectors, while other Roosevelt students sustained threats riding public transportation to school. Local gang members posed the specter of random slashings for gang initiations. Allegedly, all of Roosevelt's students lived below the poverty line. Or a student could enter Roosevelt unable to read, and, once there, soon cease attending. Often failing to graduate in four years, or even in five years as "superseniors", some became "ultraseniors", perhaps still students at age 21,—shielded anyone from blame for the deterioration. == Rejuvenation: 1990s ==

Vigorous leadership In 1992, Thelma B Baxter—whose mother had been Roosevelt's valedictorian in 1923—became Roosevelt's principal. Though Baxter was "pugnacious" like the school's namesake, and Baxter frequently walked the halls while accosting students, newly prohibited from wearing hats inside the building. In a four-year span, Roosevelt students taking the math Regents exam rose from some 200 to over 500. and Baxter was the subject of a New York Times editorial. Taken from Roosevelt's honors program, and chaperoned by English teacher Frank Brown, select students periodically visited the Williams campus, and, demonstrating commitment to the program, then graduating from Roosevelt, received full scholarships to Williams. In 1998, the same English teacher, Frank Brown, simultaneously the soccer coach, led the Roosevelt team against Martin Luther King High School in the championship game. During it, Roosevelt learned and immediately alerted the governing bureau that two of King's star players were ineligible, having played in Nigeria too many high-school seasons. After the game, coach Brown and principal Baxter sought not the 1998 boys soccer title, but merely its revocation from King. Upon finding Roosevelt's representatives accused of pettiness in a New York newspaper, Brown asserted Roosevelt's stance to instead be principled. which in turn hired singer Russell Glover, once of the Boys Choir of Harlem, to create and direct the program: Superior Effort Afterschool Liberates (SEAL). From 3pm to 5pm, SEAL included 14 activities involving some 400 of Roosevelt's roughly 4000 students. == Termination: 2000s ==

Giuliani mayorship On November 8, 1995, some 900 people, mostly parents, gathered for about two hours in the Roosevelt building. Crew vowed that his chancellorship would be "about children first, foremost, finally, and forever". Meanwhile, amid reports of school problems or bureaucratic corruption or incompetence, New York City's mayor, Rudy Giuliani, would scorn the city's Board of Education. In 1999, while several cities, including Boston, Chicago, and Cleveland, had given mayors, in fact, more control over schools, Mayor Giuliani, during that year's budget speech, instead lamented, "The whole system should be blown up". located in central Harlem. Seeking to mimic and expand her Roosevelt successes, Baxter left Roosevelt. During that month, Roosevelt would sustain 110 "criminal and disorderly incidents", although it often went unmentioned that many of them, although within Roosevelt, had been committed by other schools' students, not by Roosevelt's students. In April 2004, or three months after the riot, Mayor Bloomberg announced the addition of four schools, including Roosevelt, to the list of "impact" schools, especially violent, to get extra police presence. Others, too, found Roosevelt's building calmer. In the past year, misdemeanor assaults fell from 13 to 6, felony assaults from 5 to 1, and sexual assaults from 3 to 0. (Its building was renamed the Theodore Roosevelt Educational Campus, housing six small high schools: the Belmont Preparatory High School, the Bronx High School for Law and Community Service, the Fordham High School for the Arts, the Fordham Leadership Academy for Business and Technology, the West Bronx Academy for the Future, and the Knowledge and Power Preparatory Academy.) ==Notable alumni==

• June Allyson (1917-2006), was an American stage, film, and television actress, dancer, and singer. • Dion and the Belmonts, American vocal group of the late 1950s. Dion DiMucci, Carlo Mastrangelo, Fred Milano are all Roosevelt students. • Thelma Berlack Boozer (1906-2001), a leader in feminists movement and African-American in journalist, publicist, and city official in New York. • Rocky Colavito (1933-2024), Major League Baseball All-Star player, who was best known playing for the Cleveland Indians • Ace Frehley (1951-2025), American musician and songwriter best known as the original lead guitarist and co-founding member of the rock band Kiss (attended the school, but did not graduate) • John Garfield (1913-1952), was an American actor • Sammy Mejía (1983-), Dominican American retired professional basketball player • French Montana (b 1984), is a Moroccan-American rapper. • Ben Oglivie (1949-), Panamanian-American retired professional baseball player; first non-American-born player to lead the American League in home runs (1980) • Chazz Palminteri (1952-), American actor, screenwriter, producer and playwright • Zachary "Skeeter" Reece (1950/1951-), professional clown • Raymond Smullyan (1919-2017), American logician, mathematician, and puzzle creator • Jimmie Walker (1947-), American actor and comedian attending night classes at Roosevelt. ==References==