For over two decades, students at University Heights High School have attended classes on the leafy campus of Bronx Community College, a 50-acre haven that offers serene views of the Harlem River and a refuge from bustling Bronx streets.  For the students, the experience is something akin to a four-year dress rehearsal for college, allowing them to mix with college students and professors, study chemistry in college labs and spend afternoons on the quad in front of the grand library. The high school has a stellar academic record that teachers and parents credit in large part to the college setting.  But over the protests of students, parents, teachers and politicians, the city has ordered the school to leave the campus at the end of the school year and move to the South Bronx.  Instead of passing the Corinthian columns of Gould Memorial Library on their way to class, students next year may walk past a juvenile detention center just a few blocks from their new school.  Bronx Community College officials say that with the college’s enrollment soaring — since 2000, the student body has nearly doubled, to 11,500 — they can no longer spare a building for the high school. College administrators asked the city to relocate the school in 2008, and city officials said they had no choice but to comply.  George L. Sanchez, senior vice president of academic affairs at the college, called the decision “somewhat painful,” but said reclaiming the college’s former chemistry building from the high school would allow for as many as 20 much-needed classrooms.  “Our mission is not to support the Department of Education but to support the undergraduate students we have coming to us,” Mr. Sanchez said. “We have a responsibility, a compact to provide them with the education, the space and the facilities for them to succeed here, and that’s not possible if we have these competing environments.”  The decision has left students considering transfers, parents worried about safety and teachers mourning the loss of a special relationship that they say changed hundreds of lives. The high school was founded to be on the campus; if it moves, the community says, its reason for being may be lost. The relocation has nothing to do with the school’s academic performance, city and college officials maintain. University Heights High School received an A on its 2008-09 progress report, as it had the previous two years, and the graduation rate last year was 86.8 percent, far above the Bronx’s average of 54.2 percent.  More than 80 percent of the senior class was planning to attend college, and roughly a third of them have applied to Bronx Community College, said Hazel Joseph-Roseboro, the school’s principal. She herself graduated from the high school — she declined to say how long ago — and she said the school, and its setting, spurred her on her path.  “I know what the fruits of being on the campus can lead to because I went to college, became a teacher and worked my way up,” she said.  To force such a successful school to move, parents and teachers feel, shows the city’s disregard for the students who are flourishing there.  “I just think they don’t care about our kids,” said Nona Samuels, the mother of a daughter graduating this spring and another daughter finishing her freshman year. “This wouldn’t happen downtown past 96th Street.”  There are nine other colleges in the city that house high schools on their campuses, including two in the Bronx: the Hostos-Lincoln Academy of Science is on Hostos Community College’s campus on the Grand Concourse, while the High School of American Studies is at Lehman College in the northwest Bronx.  Both campuses are far smaller than Bronx Community College, and both colleges have seen enrollment grow substantially in recent years, but neither high school has plans to relocate, according to the Department of Education.  University Heights students have staged rallies protesting the move, but the Board of Education made its decision final during a vote last month. In the weeks since, students and parents have been grasping for a reprieve and struggling to decide how best to handle the move.  Aurelis Troncoso, a junior who writes poetry and plays basketball, walks to the University Heights campus every day, as do many of the students. But next year she will have to take two trains and a bus to reach the new location, a commute that could take more than an hour. She recently visited the site on St. Ann’s Avenue for a rally, and said that the area felt “extremely dangerous.”
University Heights High School has been ejected from its leafy home on the Bronx Community College campus, and students and parents are upset about its new South Bronx location.