As of the 2014–15 school year, the school had an enrollment of 643 students and 43.0 classroom teachers (on an FTE basis), for a student–teacher ratio of 15.0:1. There were 463 students (72.0% of enrollment) eligible for free lunch and 15 (2.3% of students) eligible for reduced-cost lunch.[1]
History
Brooklyn's first public high school, the Central Grammar School (named "Central" rather than "Free" to avoid controversy over providing free "higher education" for poor children), opened September 1878 in a rented building on Court & Livingston Streets. A new building was planned on the east side of Nostrand Avenue between from Halsey and Macon Streets, designed by Superintendent of Buildings James W. Naughton, but by the time it opened in 1886, enrollment had increased to the point where it was decided to use this building as the girls' high school and to build a separate building for the boys.[3] The boys remained in the Court Street space. As there were now effectively two schools, in 1891 they were renamed as the Girls' High School and the Boys' High School. A new building for the boys was begun in 1891, on Marcy Avenue, between Madison Street & Putnam Avenue. it opened as Boys High School on November 1, 1892. In 1975 the two schools were merged once again, and shortly afterwards moved into their present building at Fulton Street and Utica Avenue.[4]
From 1986 until 2004, the school's principal was Frank Mickens, who dealt with the school's many problems during the 1980s, and turned into an excellent college preparatory institution for poor and marginalized young men and women. By 1989 some 70 percent of graduates were enrolled in colleges. Though Mickens methods were attacked on the grounds that he was steering undesirable students to other institutions, his success was hard to question;[5][6] and there had been no objections during the long years in which both Boys' and Girls' had been in decline, largely due to "steering" good students to other places.
Noted alumni
This article's list of alumni may not follow Wikipedia's verifiability policy. Please improve this article by removing names that do not have independent reliable sources showing they merit inclusion in this article AND are alumni, or by incorporating the relevant publications into the body of the article through appropriate citations.(December 2010)
^Asimov, Isaac (1973). The Early Asimov Volume 1. St. Albans, UK: Panther Books. p. 10. ISBN058603806X.
^Perez-Pena, Richard. "Albert Blaustein, Who Drafted Nations' Constitutions, Dies at 72", The New York Times, August 22, 1994. Accessed August 9, 2019. "Albert P. Blaustein, a law professor who dedicated nearly three decades of his life to drafting constitutions for nations in transition, died yesterday at Duke University Hospital in Durham, N.C., after suffering a heart attack.... Born on Oct. 12, 1921, in Brooklyn, Mr. Blaustein graduated from Boys High School at age 16."
