Dean of Harvard Law School Addresses Hunter College High School Graduates

-- One-Quarter of the Class Are Headed to Ivy League Schools in the Fall --

Date: June 26, 2003
Contact: Deborah Sack (deborah.sack@hunter.cuny.edu)
Phone: (212) 772-4070

Newly appointed Dean of Harvard Law School Elena Kagan will be this year's honored alumna at the graduation ceremony for the 186 students of Hunter College High School's class of 2003. The commencement will be held Thursday, June 26 at 5 p.m. at Hunter College's Assembly Hall in the North Building on 69th Street between Lexington and Park avenues.

Kagan, a member of the Hunter High School class of 1977, was appointed Dean of Harvard Law School in April. She will be the first woman to hold the job in the law school’s 186-year history. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, Kagan served as a clerk to former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. She taught at the University of Chicago before moving to Washington where she held several jobs in President Clinton’s administration. Kagan has taught at Harvard Law School since 1999.

Also addressing the Hunter High School graduates will be City Council member Eva Moskowitz and Hunter College President Jennifer J. Raab.

This year's class features 54 students named National Merit Finalists and six National Achievement Finalists. In addition, 25% of the graduates will be attending Ivy League schools: 12 will be going to Harvard, three to Yale, six to Cornell, five to Princeton, six to the University of Pennsylvania, five to Columbia, two to Brown and five to Dartmouth; two students are headed to Stanford and two are going to MIT.

Among those going to Ivy League schools are:

Cara Rabin, who will be attending the University of Pennsylvania in the fall, has done more than 800 hours of volunteer work during high school. She volunteered in the pediatrics ward at St. Vincent’s Hospital and won the United Hospital Fund Youth Volunteer Award in 2002 for her work with a patient with cystic fibrosis. Cara hopes to become a doctor.

Devonne Heyward lives with her brother and grandmother in Brooklyn and plans to attend Brown University in the fall. A basketball star, she has won awards for excellence in fiction. Two of her plays have been produced by the Manhattan Class Company Theater.

Michael Gould-Wartofsky has been very active in social justice issues. He founded the New York Youth Bloc, a coalition of 50 high schools dedicated to peace, justice and youth empowerment. He is also a poet. One of his poems appears in the book Poets Against the War alongside such well known poets as Rita Dove and Adrienne Rich. He will attend Harvard in the fall and hopes to "come up with new ideas to change the world."

Named the number one public high school in the nation feeding students to the Ivy League colleges by Worth magazine, Hunter College High School, part of the Hunter College Campus Schools, is a combination of junior and senior high school with an enrollment of about 1,200 students. It is a six-year program that begins in the seventh grade. Each year approximately 2,500 sixth-grade students from the five boroughs of New York City take the Hunter College High School entrance exam, competing for roughly 240 spaces in the entering class. The seventh grade is the only entry point. Students must remain New York City residents as long as they are in attendance.

The Hunter College Campus Schools (HCCS) also include an elementary school (nursery through grade 6), with an enrollment of about 360 students. The schools are publicly funded (tuition-free), chartered by the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York, and administered by Hunter College. The Campus Schools serve as coeducational laboratory schools and are organized as research and demonstration centers for students who exhibit superior cognitive ability.

About Hunter
With a highly diverse student population of more than 20,000, Hunter is the largest college in the City University of New York (CUNY) system and the first choice among all CUNY applicants. Founded in 1870, the College offers more than 170 undergraduate and graduate programs. Hunter is noted for its professional schools in education, health sciences, nursing and social work, as well as its excellence in the liberal arts. Heralded as the "Crown Jewel of CUNY" by The Princeton Review, Hunter College has a distinguished reputation for nurturing talented minority scientists and meeting the challenge of providing high-quality science education in the 21st century. The College also oversees the Hunter College Campus Schools serving gifted and talented students, preschool through grade 12. For more information about Hunter College, please visit our Web site at http://www.hunter.cuny.edu.

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