Herricks Student Pieces Together District’s Past

The following article was posted by Geoffrey Walter. It was written by Gary Simeone.

Herricks High School student Ravina Jain first got the idea to study the history of her school district while sitting in the heatlh class of her favorite teacher’s health teacher Joseph Caruso explain the fierce sports battles the school used to have with the neighboring village of Roslyn. The lecture ended up inspiring an idea for her school newspaper “The Highlander.” 

“It got me thinking how the school district has changed in the past 20 years or so,” said Jain, who has been writing for the school paper since her freshman year. “From what I’ve researched I’ve noticed that Herricks has gone from a mostly white, Christian district to a district made up of mostly Asian and Indian students. I also noticed that sports used to play a big role in our school community but now we’re mostly focused on academics and music.” 

Jain started researching her topic a few months ago and she hopes to have an article completed for the paper in September for the official 200th Anniversary of the district. She has collected numerous amounts of documents on the subject, visiting the Herricks Community Center and finding a lot of information online. So far she has collected pictures of the old high school, purchasing rights documents for school buildings, old board of education notes and journals from teachers who have long retired from the school system.

“One of the most interesting statistics I’ve found from just browsing through old high school yearbooks is that in this past years graduating class, 48 percent of the graduates were Asian, (non-white) and in the early 70’s, around 1972-73, less than one percent of the graduating class was non-white.”  

She said that looking through her notes she noticed a major demographic shift in the school’s cultural makeup in 1992 when the first non-white, non-athletic student was voted homecoming king of the class. 

“It was around this time that a massive flood of Asian and other minority students started to come into the district,” Jain said. “It was also around this time that sports seemed to be not the major focus anymore.”

Jain, who is very active in her school, plays the cello, participates in music classes and also takes part in the Mock Trial program. She was also a member of the JV girls tennis team but stopped playing after her freshman year.

She is hoping to find more information for her research article by reaching out to former teachers and alumni of the district. If anyone has old pictures, articles, experiences or anything pertaining to the history of Herricks they can reach out to her at her email address, ravinajain@gmail.com.