Once you finally get passed the grueling search for a New York City public high school -- the tours, tests, interviews and rankings finally over -- a settling-in period begins. But getting information about how it's going from your child can be even more difficult than isolating statistics on the Department of Education’s website.

High school can be a tough time socially and emotionally. Countless movies, television series, books, and documentaries are devoted to the topic of fitting in and finding high school happiness, if such a state exists.

So I have become especially curious since I learned about the overwhelming ratio of girls to boys at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School, the audition-only school where my son is a freshman.

“Did you know your school was 74% female and just 26% male?” I asked him recently. (As if he hadn’t noticed).

I soon learned that most of his classes (of about 26-34 students) had only six boys, never more, and that he didn’t mind at all.<!--more-->

Of the 2,652 students at LaGuardia, just 663 are male. Not terribly surprising for a school known for its rich arts, dance, and drama curriculum, but since I’ll have to do another search next year for my younger son, I couldn’t help wondering what the story is at other high schools – and how much it really matters.

After a non-scientific and sometimes frustrating search for statistics on a variety of websites and reports, I determined that many of the most sought-after high schools in New York City are also female-dominant. (Side note: it’s not always easy to track these statistics down, and the numbers may vary from year to year).

A few examples: Females account for 72% of the students at Bard Early College High School on the Lower East side, 65% of the students at Eleanor Roosevelt on Manhattan’s Upper East; and 62% at Baruch College Campus High. School. Manhattan’s Talented Unlimited, another arts-oriented school, is 75% female; the population is 68% female at Frank Sinatra High School in Long Island City.

Townsend Harris, a Queens academic powerhouse, is some 70% female. Females represent 56% of the student body at The New York City Lab School for Collaborative Students in Chelsea, 58% at Beacon on the Upper West Side and 62% at downtown’s Millenium High School.

On the other hand, many of the city’s eight specialized, exam-only, high schools tend to be male dominated. Brooklyn Tech, is only 41% female; while Bronx Science is 45% female. Stuyvesant is 57% male, according to its Quality Review report, a good place to search for statistics.

I also found one extreme example of a school that can answer the question of where the boys are: Automotive High School in Brooklyn has a female enrollment of just 5%.

I asked the DOE why so many top schools are female-dominated. They noted that male students are far more likely to drop out in a city where just over half the students graduate in four years.

Nationally, female students graduate at a higher rate than male students: Some 72% of female students graduated high school in 2003, compared with 65% of male students, according to a 2006 study entitled "Leaving Boys Behind: Public High School Graduation Rates" by the Manhattan Institute for Public Policy.

If I had a daughter and was in the midst of a search, I might think hard about what it would feel like to have so few boys around, especially if you didn’t purposefully choose a single sex school. I know that plenty of families who choose same sex schools feel their children are more focused, less distracted, and better able to perform academically.

Personally, though, I would have hated being surrounded by far more girls than boys. When I entered my large suburban high school in 10th grade (junior high school began in 7th grade and ended in 9th back in those dark ages) boys become the reason, some days, to go to school at all.

In the case of my freshman son, a musician, no statistic or ratio was going to deter him from choosing LaGuardia. The gender issue was a non-issue. I suspect many of the students who compete for spots feel the same.

But Insideschools.orgwould like to hear more about how people view this issue. Should some of the top schools give an edge to boys to even out their ratios? Would that be fair? And what are city high schools doing to keep boys engaged and in school?