Upper East Side parents charge that public high schools in their neighborhoods are the pits – and they want the Board of Education to build a new “rigorous” college-prep high school to serve their kids.
“Our community is outraged by the fact that not one of the four high schools situated on the Upper East Side offers a traditional, academic curriculum suited to our needs,” the Partnership for an Upper East Side High School said.
Parents point out that at the five theme or alternative high schools in the area, the average student scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, used for college admissions, are in the 800 range, compared with 1400 at the elite Stuyvesant HS and 1200 at Townsend Harris in Queens.
Upper East Side high schools include the Richard Green Teaching HS, Vanguard, Manhattan International HS, Talent Unlimited HS for the Performing Arts, and Urban Academy.
The parents complained there’s little choice in the neighborhood for kids who don’t get accepted at Stuyvesant, Bronx Science or Brooklyn Tech – the three select schools in the city.
“None of these [neighborhood] schools serve the community,” said Jeanne Kassler, co-founder of the Upper East Side parents’ group. “They don’t deliver the type of curriculum I want for my children.
“There’s no middle ground. You’ve got a crisis, in terms of what the city offers for a public high-school education.”
Kassler said she expects opponents will level charges that Upper East Siders are being elitist or exclusionary.
But she stressed that not all residents are rich, or can afford to send their kids to private school.
“I want a school that gives my child a chance at attending a good college. That’s a reasonable goal,” she said.
She said better public high schools are not a priority because much of the city’s political establishment – including Mayor Giuliani and Schools Chancellor Harold Levy – send their kids to private schools.
Levy’s office had no immediate comment.