Theodore Roosevelt High School (New York City)

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500 E Fordham Rd, Bronx, NY 10458, USA

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N40° 51' 34" W73° 53' 19"   (40.859444444444, -73.888611111111) Start navigation »

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Theodore Roosevelt High School was a large public high school in the Bronx. Fully named Roosevelt High School, apparently after the eminent Roosevelt family of New York, at its opening in November 1918, it was renamed Theodore Roosevelt High School soon after Theodore Roosevelt died in January 1919. Conducted within the building of school PS 31, the courses trained accounting and secretarial skills, drew snowballing enrollment, and gained more classrooms elsewhere. In 1928, entering its own building, newly built at 500 East Fordham Road, the Theodore Roosevelt High School became one of America's largest and best equipped high schools.Sitting at the southern edge of Fordham University's campus and the northern edge of the Bronx's Belmont section, the high school's building became a community venue for politicians' speeches and organizations' meetings. The school colors were red and white, and the sports teams were the Rough Riders—nickname of the cavalry unit led by Colonel Roosevelt before he became US President—though the mascot became a teddy bear. Its 1930s and 1940s students participated extracurricularly at roughly 50% or New York City's lowest rate. Yet Roosevelt well performed its educational role, preparing students for the basic workforce, the school's image enduring into the 1950s.In the 1960s, other high schools' students earned diplomas via Roosevelt's night classes and summer sessions while drug culture's emergence dissolved ethnic hostilities whereby a local gang, the Baldies, mostly Italian, had diminished enrollment by blacks and Hispanics, who amid halting economic progress began drug selling, common at Roosevelt by 1970, although heroin use lowered gang violence. Yet atop national stagflation, the 1970s brought New York City's financial crisis, urban decay, soaring crime rates, and white flight. The Bronx entered 1980 as urban decay's very portrait, and its high schools became notorious as the city's worst, while the crack epidemic struck, socially devastating Roosevelt.Children living in New York City's most criminal and violent area, policed by the city's most corrupt and violent officers, were zoned to Theodore Roosevelt High School, which had the city's highest dropout rate in 1984. In 1986, efforts began at Roosevelt to raise school attendance. Yet improvement was negligible until a vigorous new principal, Thelma Baxter, hired in 1992, led an astonishing turnaround. The revival was cut short by Baxter's 1999 promotion to superintendent of schools in central Harlem, whereupon the Bronx high school's deterioration rapidly resumed. In 2001, the city's Department of Education, ordered by the state's, commanded the high school to begin shutdown. In 2002, Roosevelt accepted its final freshman class, which graduated at 3% in 2006, whereupon Roosevelt closed. New since 2002, several small public high schools now occupy the building, Theodore Roosevelt Educational Campus. From the late 1930s to 1960s, at least five individuals later esteemed as celebrities—Hollywood actress June Allyson, baseball player Rocky Colavito, lead guitarist Ace Frehley, actor/screenwriter Chazz Palminteri, and comedian/actor Jimmie Walker—had attended the Theodore Roosevelt High School.

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