Grover Cleveland High School

After years of poor performance, Grover Cleveland High School seems to have turned a corner. Students feel safe and believe they have a voice in school decisions, according to a report called the Quality Review. Every student is well known by at least one staff member. Some of the school’s programs train students for jobs after high school: the health program, for example, prepares students to be medical assistants or emergency medical technicians.

The large building, built in the 1930s, features art and music rooms and extensive sports facilities. The school has a swimming pool, and students may train to be lifeguards and get summer jobs at the city’s public pools. The school’s bridge-building team has won first place in an international competition.

While Grover Cleveland has been removed from the state’s list of low-performing schools, problems remain: Enrollment has dropped by a third in less than 10 years, many students come in with weak skills or not speaking English, and graduation rates and attendance are well below the city average.

On the positive side, the school has been reorganized to ease the transition to high school, to give lots of support, and to keep students on track. Ninth graders are assigned the Tiger Academy, where they spend most of their day in classrooms clustered together in a wing of the building.

In 10th grade students enter “small learning communities” geared to their area of interest: arts, health and athletics; science and technology; and business, hospitality and tourism.

Special classes include playwriting and musicology in the arts academy and an AP computer science class for STEM students. A fifth learning community focuses on students learning English. Cleveland has numerous Advanced Placement classes. Foreign languages include Spanish and Italian. 

Special education: There are Special Education Teacher Support Services (SETSS), ICT (Integrated Collaborative Teaching) and self-contained classes.

Admissions: Grover Cleveland has a zoned program available to residents of an area in Queens along the Brooklyn border. Students from throughout the city may apply to one or more of the other programs, which all select students using the educational option method designed to admit students with a range of academic abilities. All programs give priority to Queens residents. The school does not fill all its seats and admits some incoming 10th graders. (Gail Robinson, from Department of Education and press reports, November 2018)