Countermanding The Revisionist History of the Albany City School District

I didn’t think I could get more angry about the Albany City School District and its complete excision of the history of the Street Academy / Harriet Gibbons High School.  From the school’s annexation into the District in 1974, until its conversion into a 9th grade academy in 2005, the Albany City School District treated my alma mater with almost the same ennui as one treats a bill from the gas company.

When it comes to the recent creation of the Albany City School District Hall of Fame, the school nominations form has a line on it that says one must have either attended Albany High School or the former Philip Schuyler High School; after I brought their omission of my school to their attention, they modified the application from to list a third entry – “Other.”

And then came the news this week.

In this recent post on the albanyschools.org website, the City School District is looking to update its alumni directory.  That’s all well and good.  I understand this is the way that people can get back in touch with each other over time, get together for reunions, and the like.

Now look carefully at that listing.  It says “The City School District of Albany is in the process of updating…”

However, if you read further into the press release, it clearly states: “Representatives from Harris Connect will be contacting graduates of Albany High School and the former Philip Schuyler High School…”

And… and… aren’t we forgetting somebody?

Oh yeah.  Street Academy / Harriet Gibbons High School.  The Albany City School District just plumb forgot them again.

I got in touch with a representative from the school district, who passed along my contact information to the Harris Connect company.  She also noted that an alumni listing was created in 1996, but that my school had been left off the list “because we thought it had closed down.”

Nice.

But after a few telephone calls, I was able to confirm that although the listing on the school district website says that inclusion is for alumni from “The City School District,” what they really only want is for alumni from Albany High and, begrudgingly, Philip Schuyler HS.  And the Harris Connect company was contracted to only do research for those two high schools, and for no other public high schools in the area.

You know what – I’m getting fed up with this.  I’m fed up with the exclusion of my alma mater from the history of the Albany City School District.

So a couple of years ago, I decided to take some action.

I decided to put together my own little history project. It’s a bare-bones website, devoted to whatever information and history I could acquire, on the existence of Street Academy / Harriet Gibbons High School, from the school’s foundation in 1969 to its eventual conversion into a Ninth Grade Academy in 2005.

The website contains scans of yearbooks, oral histories, images of graduation programs, and the like.  Don’t be looking for any fancy javascript or joomla or drupal or any other bells and whistles.  I can handle simple HTML and that’s about it.  But I wanted to build something to remember my high school with.  In fact, I even added it to the collection of links on the right side of this blog listing.

And I’m willing to accept any other images, scans, memories, etc. to add to the website.  If you’ve got old yearbooks, old photos, old anything that’s connected to this school, and want to see it added to the webpage, drop me a line.

Because if the Albany City School District can’t seem to recall that for 30 years there was more than one public high school in this area, then I suppose I gotta do their work for them.