SLAMMER: Murry Bergtraum HS was once a gem of the city school system but is now ridiculed on the Web as a hellhole. (J.C. Rice)
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They posted a photo of the massive brick school on Facebook with the comment: “Not sure if Bergtraum or jail.”
“HELL AWAITS,” blares another photo, one of many mocking their alma mater, Murry Bergtraum HS for Business Careers.
Once the pride of downtown, Bergtraum is now the shame of the city education system — a school and a student body all but abandoned by City Hall, which sits just two blocks away.
The worst part, teachers say: It’s been done on purpose.
“We think they’re consciously destroying it, so Bloomberg can close it down,” one said.
Bergtraum is a “warehouse” school, a last resort for students who have been shut out elsewhere or don’t care where they go.
Mayor Bloomberg has concentrated on opening smaller, more manageable schools, often at the expense of places like Bergtraum, critics say. Meanwhile, 1,800 teens are in a turbulent limbo, epitomized by a 2010 melee, captured in a YouTube video, in which students tussled with safety officers, and one punched a cop in the face. The fight erupted over then-Principal Andrea Lewis’ restriction on restroom visits.
“Bergtraum used to stand for high-quality education, a sought-after name on a young person’s résumé,” said John Elfrank-Dana, a teacher for 23 years. “No more. Now the Bergtraum name conjures up riots.”
Bergtraum opened in 1975 in a new $22 million triangular building that shared space with the old New York Telephone Co. Named for a former president of the city’s Board of Education, it was one of the first high schools in the country to specialize in business education.
It offered two full years of accounting, plus computer science, investment and finance, taxation, even secretarial studies. It attracted the city’s smart kids. Alumni include Department of Education Chief Operating Officer Veronica Conforme, actor John Leguizamo and rapper Q-Tip.
“I remember learning how to do employment payroll forms. It was just amazing,” said William Skody, who graduated in 1982 and now co-owns a successful accounting firm near Wall Street.
In the 1982 yearbook, founding Principal Barbara Christen said, “Our one basic goal is to make Murry Bergtraum the best high school in New York City.”
In 2002, the year Bloomberg took office, Bergtraum was still going strong. A review by watchdog group Inside Schools found that the school was so popular, it ran double sessions to accommodate an overflow of 700 students.
The school offered seven special programs, all in high demand. In 2004, 2,046 students vied for 133 spots in computer science and 2,982 sought 171 seats in finance.
But by 2010, just 538 applied for 160 seats in computer science, not enough to guarantee the slots would be filled since students apply to multiple schools. This year, students applied only to its Ninth-Grade Academy. Enrollment has dropped by 38 percent since 2006.
The problem was partly due to Bergtraum’s vocational focus, said Eric Nadelstern, the DOE’s deputy chancellor for school support and instruction from 2009 to 2011. Trade high schools have had trouble keeping up with advances in the work world, he said.
But Bergtraum’s original mission was to offer a full academic education with business credits “so that all students were prepared for both the business world and college,” said Barbara Esmilla, a former Bergtraum teacher, coach and principal eight years until she retired in 2010.
Black Enterprise magazine reported in 1988 that 450 Bergtraum grads found jobs at major companies in the area, and 75 to 80 percent went on to college.
Competition also increased. As the Bloomberg administration pushed for the creation of small schools of 400 to 500 kids each, students had more choices. More than 500 such schools have sprouted in the last decade.
“Those were options that didn’t exist when Bergtraum broke ground,” said Nadelstern, now a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College.
Half of Bergtraum’s students are chosen by school administrators, and half are selected randomly. But as better students chose to go elsewhere, Bergtraum entered a brutal spiral.
“If you can’t fill your seats with kids who want to go there, either your enrollment shrinks or the DOE fills the seats with kids who didn’t want to be there,” said Clara Hemphill, a founder of Inside Schools.
Bloomberg has no strategy to save large schools, she said.
“I don’t think the Bloomberg administration set out to destroy the big schools, but their policies were designed to nurture the small school,” she said. “The big schools were neglected at best and undermined at worst.”
At Bergtraum, the DOE has shoveled in more low-performing students with nowhere to go after the closure of other big schools, such as Martin Luther King on the Upper West Side, Seward Park on the Lower East Side and Park West in Hell’s Kitchen, staffers say.
“We were the dumping ground,” Elfrank-Dana said. “That was the beginning of the end.”
Nearly 80 percent of 1,800 current students, down from 2,400 last year, come from poor homes. They get a no-frills education.
“Walls and desks, that’s it,” a substitute said. “No books, no maps, no Smart Board. I could not believe the poverty of that room.”
Kids told The Post they can’t learn. Students “ruin the classes,” as freshman Guillermo, 14, put it.
“They keep talking, fighting, disrupting,” he said.
His English teacher “can’t get through a sentence. She’ll say, ‘Be quiet,’ and they’ll be quiet for a second, then start up again.”
In math, students taunt his teacher. “They say he stinks. They make fun of his bald spot. They curse him — ‘You ugly motherf–ker.’ One time, they threw a ball of foil at him,” Guillermo said.
Sophomore Amber Mena, 15, was matter-of-fact about the mayhem.
“The kids are crazy. They’re fighting every day — in the class, in the halls, everywhere,” she said.
Attendance is poor — 78 percent this year. The graduation rate last year was just 58 percent, with only 18 percent of students deemed prepared for community college, based on Regents exams or SAT scores.
Bergtraum has gutted its business program and cut the number of business teachers in half. As academic requirements increased, “the DOE would not fund these programs,” Esmilla said.
A current class list includes accounting and advertising, but no finance, taxation or investment. While nearly all upperclassmen landed internships in the past, only 15 now hold one, the list shows.
“They started to water down their programs, and soon it became just a regular high school,” said the alum Skody.
Bergtraum dropped its orchestra and jazz band but boasts a winning girls hoops team, the Lady Blazers.
Orley Pacheco, a 2002 grad, credits a student internship at Goldman Sachs with helping him land a job as a financial adviser for Prudential after five years in the Marines.
“It’s a shame, because Murry Bergtraum started my career.”
Syracuse University has trained teachers in the school and offers credit-bearing college-level courses to Bergtraum students.
Students can still find mentors from the business world, including Deloitte and the Financial Women’s Association.
“Many good kids are going to colleges,” Esmilla said. “These are some of the good things that go on despite the difficulties that the school faces.”
But many students are lucky to walk away with a sheepskin. When ex-Principal Lewis arrived at Bergtraum in the fall of 2010, she told probers, she found 995 “super seniors,” or students ages 18 to 21.
Her solution: a Leadership Academy that gave credits like candy to kids who rarely showed up or just goofed off, ex-staffers said.
This fall, the DOE replaced Lewis with Lottie Almonte, 41, whose lack of experience with large schools — Bergtraum’s budget is $14.3 million — raised concern.
Almonte has led a school for over-age students and a day-care center for students. She also served briefly as principal of Brooklyn’s Performing Arts and Technology HS.
Schools investigator Richard Condon recommended that she be disciplined for letting a private group run basketball tournaments in the building. The move cost the DOE “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in security and custodial costs, he said.
DOE officials refused to answer questions about Bergtraum.
Almonte, meanwhile, has hired Kian Brown, a “branding consultant,” as a community coordinator.
Their answer to Bergtraum’s woes: A new logo, Web site and mascot to rouse school spirit and tout its accomplishments.
“We have some great success stories. A lot of these kids come from tough backgrounds and family situations,” Brown said. “They come to us as a haven and leave empowered.”
Additional reporting by Melissa Klein and Michael Gartland