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Good morning, this is Mike with Chalkbeat New York.

Today, we’re bringing you a story that I’ve been working on for months about New York City’s smallest traditional high school: Murry Bergtraum High School for Business Careers, which enrolled just 92 students last year. The school has grown so small that some students need to go to night school to take classes they need for graduation — and it advertises no extracurricular activities aside from the sports it shares with the other three schools in its building.

“When you look at the other schools, it’s mad people, mad opportunities,” one student told me. “But when you come to our school, really nothing.”

But it wasn’t always this way. Just two decades ago, Murry Bergtraum was a bustling and largely thriving school with nearly 3,000 students. I dug into the history of how the school diminished to its current state — and how it remains open today despite repeated warnings from top officials that the school should close.

“What we all know about what kids deserve is not happening there,” the school’s former superintendent told me.

Now, as New York City deals with a growing number of severely underenrolled schools, the story of Murry Bergtraum is particularly relevant.

Read the full story here.

And there’s more reporting to come. We’ll soon be publishing a followup on some of the solutions that city officials can pursue when it comes to very small schools, and what’s standing in the way.

Let us know what you think at [email protected].

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Local News

From 3,000 students to about 90: Inside the decades-long failure to fix or close NYC’s smallest high school

NYC’s inaction on closing Murry Bergtraum High School is shortchanging the public school’s 90 students at a cost of $46,000 per pupil, a Chalkbeat investigation reveals.