Most were surprised. The Department of Education had not consulted any of them, remembered Jose Vazquez, the high school’s parent coordinator. If it had, officials would have discovered enough passion and talent among them to rescue the legendary institution from oblivion. Teachers and students believed the system’s efforts would be better spent improving the school rather than eliminating it.

“There are a lot of parents, including myself, who feel that turning the high school into smaller schools is a drastic move,” said Grace Hunter, Roosevelt’s PTA president. “You have to fix the problem before you try and start something else.”

Some important Bronx history, staffers believed, would disappear along with the school. The imposing four-story campus was built in 1919 in the heart of downtown Bronx, near such landmarks as the Grand Concourse, Fordham University and the Bronx Botanical Gardens. Theodore Roosevelt High School has educated generations of South Bronx teenagers, including actor Chazz Palminteri and Ace Frehley, the guitarist from the rock group KISS.

Still, no one disputes that Roosevelt is a troubled school. It reported unacceptably high drop-out rates and low test scores in 2001, the year it was slated for elimination. By 2002, 85.7 percent of the Roosevelt students who took the Regents Competency Test in English failed it; 40 percent failed math. That same year, only 33 percent of its seniors graduated.

Attendance rates are equally dismal. Last school year, Roosevelt students on average attended only 60 percent of their school days, versus 83.3 percent of days for the rest of the city’s schools. Vazquez estimates that on any given day, one-third of Roosevelt’s students are absent or truant. Hundreds of students have been listed on the school’s register as freshmen for years because they are perpetual “LTA’s” or long-term absences.

Many of Roosevelt’s students and parents believe, however, that their school has many positive attributes the department overlooked when they decided to shut the school down. Vazquez cited the school’s English as a Second Language program, which had classes for both students and parents. The PTA president commended the school’s great teachers.

Roosevelt’s administrators struggle to understand why the New York City Department of Education decided to close a high school with such a long history, not all of it negative.

“You want to know the truth?” said Ed Gardella, who became principal in 2004, “I haven’t gotten any answers. The Department of Education hasn’t explained why it feels that closing the schools means that its problems will go away, instead of starting over again.”

A Department of Education spokesperson said schools are chosen for closure after they have been on the state’s Schools Under Registration Review list for three years or more. The list, according to spokesperson Kelly Devers, identifies schools around the state with the lowest of the low achievement rates.

In 1999, Theodore Roosevelt High School reported that nearly 26.3 percent of its students dropped out within four years; only one-third made it to graduation within four years. The school was placed on the department’s grade retention trouble list that year. One year later, Roosevelt was on the general Schools Under Registration Review list, where it remains to this day.

Roosevelt is not alone. The city’s high schools graduate only half of the students enrolled in them within four years. For Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, small schools provide a neat solution. One hundred have opened up over the past several years, with class sizes capped at 25. The department plans to open 200 altogether for 22,000 students by the year 2007, by building new ones and reconstituting older, bigger high schools like Roosevelt into smaller units. (See “A Dying Giant: Brooklyn’s Wingate High School Prepares to Close”)

Small schools are renowned for their low drop out rates. A 1998 study by the Institute for Education and Social Policy at New York University found that only 5 percent of students enrolled in the New York City’s small high schools had dropped out after four years, as opposed to 13 percent of their counterparts at traditional schools. Other research shows that small schools improve students’ performance and attendance rates, especially among poor students.

In order to accommodate the new small schools, the Department of Education restructured several existing low-performing schools, including Roosevelt, Evander Childs High School in the North Bronx, Martin Luther King Jr. High School on the West Side and George Washington High School in Washington Heights. All of these schools were on the Schools Under Registration Review list.

The promise of the small schools movement, though, is lost on those left behind in the obsolete big high schools.

Roosevelt accepted its last freshmen in 2002; in 2006, it will graduate its last class. “Students are almost more traumatized than the teachers and staff are,” said RoseAnne Collins-Judon, an assistant principal, “They don’t feel like they were given a voice in the decision to close the school.”

On one Tuesday afternoon in April after school, Theodore Roosevelt students talked about the demise of their school with a mixture of resignation, disbelief and regret as they sat on benches at the Fordham Metro North train station a block from school. Many were still angry that their voices were never considered.

John Cruz, 18, said he only heard about the school closing a year ago when his guidance counselor told him.

“The school has been there for so long, why close it? I don’t understand why they can’t keep it open at the same time with the small schools,” said Cruz, a junior who plans to go to college after he graduates next year.

Others had only praise for the doomed school. “The teachers are good,” said Edward Padilla, 17. “I like the way that they work. They give us after school help to prepare for the Regents.”

Cruz shrugged off Roosevelt’s poor reputation. “The school also has good sports,” he said. “If you want to learn, you will learn. You will get a good education.”

On a table nearby, an 18-year-old senior offered a more critical view and said that she often fantasized about transferring out of Roosevelt. “It’s not good at all,” said Lydia Cooper. “The teachers are no good, we only have old textbooks. The new schools get all the new books.”

Safety is also an issue for her. “There are a lot of fights,” said Cooper. “That’s why there are security cameras. There’s stuff like smoking in the bathrooms.”

Lydia blamed most of the fights on students at the small schools who, she said, were mostly freshmen or sophomores and very immature. “All the freshmen are crazy,” she said. “They make Roosevelt look bad. They don’t how it is to be in high school.”

In fact, even before Theodore Roosevelt was chosen for revamping, it had become synonymous with violence. All students now have to pass through a metal detector on their way into the building and there is a security guard around every corner.

In the 2003 to 2004 school year, the Theodore Roosevelt campus reported nearly twice the number of security incidents, which range from loitering to major crimes such as felony assault, as other similar sized schools in the cities. That year, the chancellor added Theodore Roosevelt to his list of the city’s most dangerous public schools after a riot broke out in its suspension center.

Many of Roosevelt’s administrators believe, however, that the riot illustrated how the school’s bad rap has been unfairly foisted on it. “The suspension center had kids from other high schools in the Bronx,” said Collins-Judon. “The students involved weren’t all from Roosevelt, but that’s how the press made it seem.”

Another overlooked issue that contributes to violence is overcrowding. Theodore Roosevelt High School was built for 2,500 to 3,000 students. By 2001, however, over 4,097 students were crammed into its four floors, along with over 300 teachers. Now Theodore Roosevelt has less than 1,500 students and 100 teachers, divided between the first and the fourth floors.

The new small schools, which were introduced into the newly dubbed Roosevelt Educational Campus two years ago, take up the other two floors. Each school is kept separate by security guards who patrol the hallways and watch students on video monitors to prevent them from wandering into the other schools.

Giant felt banners divide the hallways, announcing where each school begins and ends– Belmont Preparatory, the Bronx High School for Law and Community Service, the Fordham High School for the Arts and the Fordham Leadership Academy for Business and Technology. Two other schools, the Bronx Engineering and Technology Academy and the West Bronx Academy for the Future, a middle school, are also temporarily housed on the campus.

So far, the new schools are doing well, especially in comparison to Theodore Roosevelt. Belmont Preparatory High School, for example, has an 85 percent attendance rate. The school’s mission is to prepare students for college. Its hallways are lined with the pendants of schools where students plan to apply: the University of Michigan, Hunter College, Howard University.

Down the hall from Belmont Prep is the Fordham Leadership Academy for Business and Technology, where several classrooms are set up like corporate offices. Students sit in cubicles and practice their math and writing skills by drafting business plans on laptops.

Vazquez estimates that about 30 of Theodore Roosevelt’s teachers now work at the campus’s small schools. But the transition has been more difficult for the rest of the teachers, many of whom are now on the Department of Education’s waiting list for new assignments.

Shepherding Roosevelt’s last students out of the school has also proven difficult. There are currently more than 300 students on Roosevelt’s long-term absence list. Some students have been listed as freshmen in the school’s register for the past three, four or five years, Vazquez said.

The school’s attendance teachers have stepped up their efforts to account for truants. “They send out letters every week. If a kid is absent for more than three days, they send out a letter,” Vazquez said.

Many of the letters, however, are returned with no new addresses. Vazquez keeps stacks of them in his office, piled up on his desk, tucked into bookshelves and squeezed into filing cabinets.

The school keeps them to verify, at least, that the student no longer lives at the address on the envelope. Vazquez estimates that about 10 to 15 percent of letters get returned each week. If the students do not graduate by 2006, Vazquez said that their names will be distributed among the other school’s registers until they turn 21 and age out of the school system.

Vazquez shrugged as he pointed to the letters. Students will get lost as Theodore Roosevelt High School is phased out, he said, along with the efforts that the school had been making to help them. One successful program was its English as a Second Language (ESL) curriculum.

Eight percent of Roosevelt’s students are still recent immigrants, most from the Dominican Republic. But they no longer have access to any language help. The school’s ESL program and computer labs were phased out one year after Roosevelt was put on the chopping block.

The PTA president blamed apathetic parents for many of the school’s problems, including the low test scores and truancy rates. “Why they blame the school for that is beyond me,” Hunter said. “If parents showed more interest in their children’s work, then the drop out rate wouldn’t be as high as it is now.”

But getting parents involved in their kids’ high school – especially one that will not exist in a year – seemed like Sisyphian task. On one April afternoon, Vazquez and Hunter carried trays filled with barbeque chicken and gallon bottles of soda into the auditorium for a 6:30 p.m. PTA meeting. By 7 p.m. no parents and no teachers had appeared. The principal popped in briefly to grab some chicken, and then he left.

Hunter reasoned that many parents were still at work. Others were reticent because their English was not good. Still others worked in welfare-to-work programs late into the night.

The stage had been decorated for a talent show that would feature students from each of the campus’s schools. Paper stars taped to the proscenium kept peeling off. “All the little stars are falling down,” Hunter said.

“It hurts me so much that I do this and no one takes the time to find out,” she said. “Maybe it’s selfish on my part. But it’s just a shame.”

The afternoon before the PTA meeting, Roosevelt junior Carol Leiva waited for the bus with her school friends. She expects to graduate in Theodore Roosevelt’s last class, the class of 2006.

“The school is getting nowhere,” Leiva said. “A lot of kids don’t pass the Regents. They could try, but they don’t. Maybe it’s better off this way.”