"Immediately, everybody might be their very own agent," stated Mymoena Davids, who graduated from LaGuardia in 2016. "If you may get seen on TikTok... honing your craft at a performing arts college would not provide the leg up it as soon as did."
NY Submit picture composite
LaGuardia Excessive Faculty is squandering its legacy of creative glory, critics say — and children are voting with their toes.
During the last decade, functions to the world-famous “Fame college” plummeted by 73 %, from greater than 15,000 in 2012 to lower than 5,000 in 2019 and 2020, as competitors for seats in different top-ranked excessive colleges held regular.
LaGuardia’s enrollment dropped by 19% between 2019 and 2021 — the one one of many metropolis’s 9 elite specialised excessive colleges to lose college students through the pandemic shutdown. The decline triggered a $1.25 million money infusion from the Division of Schooling to paper over a yawning finances hole.
On the similar time, the college’s star-making equipment, which cranked out a whole lot of famend actors, musicians and artists for greater than 80 years, appears to have floor to a halt.
As just lately as 2015 — when Jharrel Jerome snagged a starring position in an Academy Award-winning Greatest Image, “Moonlight,” inside months of his commencement — LaGuardia college students regularly rocketed into showbiz straight from its storied halls.
Ansel Elgort starred reverse Shailene Woodley in “The Fault in Our Stars” two years after his 2012 commencement. Timothee Chalamet of the Class of ’13 launched his profession with the TV collection “Homeland” whereas nonetheless attending LaGuardia, then scored an Oscar nomination for 2017’s “Name Me By Your Identify.” Staten Island songbird Julia Gargano, LaGuardia ‘16, was an “American Idol” finalist in 2020.
However “not a single individual from the courses that got here after us has reached that form of success,” stated Mymoena Davids, a LaGuardia alum who graduated with Gargano in 2016.
A poisonous brew of inside battle, excessive coverage shifts beneath two principals with polar-opposite plans, a snobbish refusal to recruit contemporary expertise, and even the rise of TikTok has battered LaGuardia’s status, insiders say.
“We're witnessing the decline of greatness,” stated Frances Kweller, a non-public highschool counselor whose purchasers have been balking at making use of.
“It’s actually upsetting to assume that college students could possibly be turning away from LaGuardia,” Gargano instructed The Submit. “That college singlehandedly modified my life. It’s irreplaceable.”
Since its 1936 founding as town’s first public highschool for artistically gifted college students, Fiorello H. LaGuardia Excessive Faculty Of Music & Artwork and Performing Arts has educated generations of high actors, dancers, singers, musicians and visible artists — from Liza Minnelli, Eartha Kitt and Robert De Niro to Jennifer Aniston, Adrien Brody and Nicki Minaj.
Al Pacino, Ben Vereen, Suzanne Vega, Awkwafina, Dom DeLuise, Billy Dee Williams and Sarah Michelle Gellar are only a few of the 500-plus bold-faced names that seem on the college’s checklist of notable alumni.
The high-energy inventive hothouse impressed the 1980 film “Fame,” starring Debbie Allen and Anne Meara, in addition to a 2009 remake that includes Kelsey Grammer. The movie franchise, which spun off a six-season TV collection and a Broadway musical, saved LaGuardia within the public eye for many years.
The film’s unforgettable theme music, carried out by onetime LaGuardia pupil Irene Cara, gained the Academy Award for Greatest Authentic Track in 1980 and stays the highschool’s anthem. Callers to its major workplace will hear Cara warbling “I’m gonna dwell endlessly!” whereas they wait on maintain.
LaGuardia is the one one among New York Metropolis’s 9 specialised excessive colleges that doesn’t use the SHSAT entrance examination to find out admission. Underneath state regulation, candidates should go an audition and present passable middle-school grades.
That very same regulation requires LaGuardia to offer each college-prep teachers and conservatory-level arts coaching.
“I utilized due to that twin mission, the equal concentrate on each teachers and the humanities,” stated senior class president Leo Glasgow, an completed clarinetist who will double main in political science and Mandarin at Cornell College this fall. “LaGuardia isn’t LaGuardia due to leniency.”
However balancing these two imperatives has been a thorny drawback for 2 successive principals — and has roiled LaGuardia’s college students, mother and father and school for years.
In 2013, new principal Lisa Mars made sweeping modifications to LaGuardia’s arts choices when she arrived from the tutorial powerhouse Townsend Harris Excessive Faculty in Queens. Mars eradicated long-established music teams, together with a flute ensemble, two symphony orchestras, and a symphonic band. She reduce piano and guitar courses and yanked programs on orchestration and jazz.
Of their place, Mars pumped up LaGuardia’s college-level Superior Placement programs.
Many college students protested the abrupt shift. “We're pressured into [AP] programs we don’t wish to take in order that the college can boast excessive [college] enrollment statistics,” one group griped in an offended letter to the administration.
Davids and Gargano, sophomores when Mars took the helm, had been among the many first to really feel the impression.
“LaGuardia was at all times an academically pushed college. We at all times took AP courses,” Davids stated. “However when Lisa Mars turned principal, it turned a matter of not one AP class a semester, however three.”
The pressure on a college filled with high-achieving artists — who routinely stay within the constructing till 10 p.m. to rehearse main productions just like the annual opera — was acute.
“It was such a heavy load to pile on us,” Gargano recalled. “We had been so stressed. Lots of us simply didn’t have the bandwidth.”
In the meantime, a 2014 lawsuit revealed that Mars had overhauled LaGuardia’s admission requirements to favor guide smarts over expertise, making the audition price simply 14 % of an applicant’s total rating.
Almost one-fifth of the dance college students accepted in 2014 reportedly flunked their dance trials — however excessive grades and good standardized check scores acquired them admitted. That very same yr, an eighth-grade dancer who notched an ideal 100 on her audition was rejected for her weak junior-high transcript.
“I do know children with great expertise who wouldn't have made it in beneath the tutorial standards that principal put in place,” stated Jeanne McManus, Gargano’s mom. “That’s when individuals began steering away.
“LaGuardia was an exquisite protected haven for youths who might battle academically however thrive musically,” McManus added. “It was a disgrace to see it change.”
The Division of Schooling didn't remark by deadline. Mars didn't return a name for remark.
A dearth of arts training in metropolis colleges can be draining the expertise pool, stated longtime LaGuardia music trainer Paula Washington.
“Few public colleges are making ready children for the humanities the way in which they used to,” “Washington, who retired in 2020, stated. “When each intermediate college had a band, a refrain, and an orchestra, children acquired their coaching of their colleges. We’d have many candidates whose mother and father didn't have the means for personal classes. Increasingly more, that’s been uncared for.”
The rise of social media is taking a toll too, Davids stated.
“Immediately, everybody might be their very own agent,” she stated. “If you may get seen on TikTok, or get solid from a platform like Backstage.com, honing your craft at a performing arts college doesn’t provide the leg up it as soon as did.”
Leo and different present college students solid blame on DOE incompetence. Junior-high steerage counselors in most metropolis colleges, they are saying, fail to level budding performers towards the college that was created only for them.
“In my center college, I obtained nothing however a 10-minute meeting on how one can fill out the highschool utility,” Leo stated. “I’m solely right here as a result of I did the analysis for myself.”
Leo is one among simply two seniors who got here to LaGuardia from Russell Sage JHS in Forest Hills, Queens. In the meantime, he stated, feeder colleges like MS 51 in Park Slope and MS 243 on the Higher West Aspect usher 30 or extra children into LaGuardia annually.
“My center college had a number of proficient musicians who had been additionally robust college students,” he stated. “However nobody helped them. Nobody inspired them to use.”
Furthermore, LaGuardia directors reportedly make little effort to woo potential college students.
La Guardia's many well-known alumni embody "EGOT" Liza Minnelli...
Oscar, Tony and Emmy-winning actor Al Pacino...
Tony winner Ben Vereen...
... and multi-talented actress, rapper, and comic Awkwafina.
“They're utterly unwelcoming,” stated a Manhattan mom who just lately researched excessive colleges together with her eighth-grade daughter. “There was no method to go to, and if you happen to go on the web site, there’s nothing there. It’s like they’re saying, ‘Please don’t apply.’”
In 2020, LaGuardia college students launched an initiative known as Outreach to help promising children from low-income neighborhoods — doing the work that the DOE has ignored.
“We arrange Zoom calls with children from colleges within the outer boroughs,” Leo stated. “We had been amazed on the questions we had been getting: ‘Does LaGuardia have dorms?’ ‘How a lot is tuition?’ They do not know.”
“It’s utterly student-run, nobody within the administration participates,” he stated. “However why is it that my college isn’t reaching out to those college students?”
Oscar-winning legend Robert De Niro is one other well-known LaGuardia alum...
...as is rapper Nicki Minaj...
..."Buffy" actress Sarah Michelle Gellar...
...present Hollywood heartthrob Timothée Chalamet...
and one among America's most well-known stars, Jennifer Aniston.
“I acquired the sense they’re simply resting on their laurels,” stated a Brooklyn dad whose daughter, a proficient visible artist, was one among at the least 43 members of the present junior class to flee LaGuardia during the last two years. “I really feel accountable for encouraging her to assume that this college was your best option, simply due to its nice repute.”
‘It’s actually upsetting to assume that college students could possibly be turning away from LaGuardia. That college singlehandedly modified my life.’
LaGuardia HS alum and “American Idol” 2020 finalist Julie Gargano
Within the fall of 2018 – unbeknownst even to school members, insiders stated – functions dipped to their lowest ebb, with simply 4,263 college students auditioning for LaGuardia’s class of 2023. Just a few months later, in June 2019, Mars was booted from her publish.
Her substitute, Yeou-Jey Vasconcelos, arrived with loads of arts cred as the previous principal of Expertise Limitless, a well-liked Manhattan highschool with a music, drama and dance focus.
Vasconcelos quickly sparked her personal controversy when she tried to reverse Mars’ insurance policies. In 2021, some LaGuardia mother and father protested when the brand new principal proposed a cutback on AP courses – partly as a result of “standardized check scores replicate systemic racism relatively than pupil achievement,” households had been instructed.
Purposes rose to 9,776 as Vasconcelos notched her first full yr as principal — and as auditions had been submitted nearly attributable to COVID-19.
However final month, anger erupted once more when college students nearing the tip of their AP Calculus course discovered that the category had been deemed ineligible for AP credit score. Two weeks later, after media outcry, the course regained its AP certification, however the harm was executed.
“It regarded just like the administration was sabotaging the youngsters who've a extra educational focus,” stated a dad or mum chief. “All of the households who had been pushing for extra AP courses final yr have college students in that calculus class.
“Everybody says they wish to obtain that twin mission,” the supply stated. “But it surely’s very tough with an administration that’s so heavy-handed and, apparently, retaliatory.”
Vasconcelos declined to remark.
Gargano says the mission should be rescued.
“I'd not be the place I'm on this trade with out my LaGuardia expertise,” she stated. “When you realize that each individual within the constructing has been accepted due to their expertise and their smarts, it does a lot on your craft. You by no means discover that stage of expertise out on this planet.
“It’s simply the good place within the universe.”
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