University Heights Secondary School – District 7 – InsideSchools

Students can apply to up to two screened programs, STEM and Humanities, and high achievers can test into an honors track starting in 10th grade. Top graduates have been admitted to highly selective colleges such as New York University, University of Wisconsin, Spelman, Bard, Vassar, Trinity, Sarah Lawrence, Brown and Columbia.

The school is warm and collegial. Students call teachers by their first names, but teachers expect a certain level of academic maturity. For example, 10th-graders are instructed to use MLA style to format research logs for big projects in science class.

University Heights belongs to a consortium of 30 schools whose students are exempt from taking most state Regents exams. Instead, they present portfolios of their work. Everyone must also log community service hours and complete at least one college course to graduate. Seven college courses are offered at the school, taught by professors from Bronx Community College; topics include business, psychology, painting and sociology.

The school is particularly strong in science and math, offering many advanced courses to challenge students at every level, including AP Calculus, Statistics, AP biology, AP Physics and AP Science and Genetics. In a popular 9th grade course, teens face engineering design challenges such as making battery-operated cars, trebuchets, bridges and other machines. Principal Hazel Joseph Roseboro says that both male and female students have gone on to study engineering in college, for example, at Purdue and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Roseboro has been at University Heights for decades, first as a student, then as a teacher and administrator. “I tell my students, ‘If I can do it, you can do it,’” she says. Staff members are happy and tend to stay for years. Every Friday, the entire staff gets together before the first bell for a school-sponsored breakfast, a tradition as old as the school.

University Heights offers a long list of electives including theater, creative writing, band, robotics, genetics and neuroscience to name a few. The many extracurriculars include Bronx Lacrosse, DreamYard Dance and Theater, gaming, mock trial, cooking, web design, yoga and more.

In 2010, University Heights lost its space on the Bronx Community College campus and moved into its current home, a former elementary school building shared with Mott Haven Village Preparatory School. The space is old and the hallways are narrow, but the school is tidy. Some classes are large.

Technology is updated, accessible to all and used in many ways from digital portfolios to instruction. Every classroom has its own laptop cart, students have access to a computer lab and a library with a media center. 

The school’s athletic facilities were recently renovated. The many sports teams are shared with Mott Haven Village Prep, as is a LYFE center, which offers free childcare to young mothers at both schools. A psychologist, nurse and doctor are on-site five days a week in the Montefiore operated school-based clinic available to all students free of charge.

Students can earn up to 18 college credits in partnership with CUNY. The high school produces five to ten POSSE scholarship recipients per year, as well as Gates Millennium scholarship winners, whose education is fully funded through graduate school. (Lydie Raschka, phone interview, January 2018; updated August 2020)