A School by Any Other Name

Following quickly on the heels of his Monday morning proclamation that the Glen Oaks school campus will be renamed in honor of sitting Republican State Senator/Assemblyman Frank Padavan, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein today announced several further objectively non-political school renamings:

-- Louis Brandeis High School, named after the renowned Supreme Court Justice, will be called the Joseph Bruno School of Government

-- Lehman High School in the Bronx will be renamed Giuliani Partners School of Yankee Baseball Studies.

-- Manhattan’s High School of Economics and Finance will be relocated to Bloomberg L.P.’s midtown headquarters in Bloomberg Tower and known as (what else?) Bloomberg High School.

-- Martin Luther King High School will be referred to only as the Pastor Jeremiah Wright Campus until November 5, 2008.

-- Nancy Reagan High School will constitute the new name of what was formerly Eleanor Roosevelt High School.

-- Stuyvesant High School, Bronx School of Science, and Brooklyn Tech will hereinafter be collectively referred to as the Intelligent Design Cooperative.

-- P.S. 9 in Brooklyn, formerly the Teunis G. Bergen school, will be renamed the Eliot Spitzer Client #9 Memorial School.

-- Forest Hills High School will now be known as John and Cindy McCain Straight Talk High School.

-- Tottenville High School on Staten Island will henceforth be known as Guy and Susan Molinari High School.

-- The name of P.S. 14 in Staten Island, Cornelius Vanderbilt, will be updated as the Oddo-Ignizio School in recognition of James Oddo and Vincent Ignizio as the only two sitting Republicans on the 51-member NY City Council.

-- P.S. 17 in Queens, now known as the Henry David Thoreau School, will be christened the Mortimer Zuckerman Elementary School in honor of the NY Daily News’s persistent blind championing of every Mayoral effort to corporatize the City’s public school system and in recognition of the level of its prose.

-- Finally, in what was certainly the day's most unusual bipartisan announcement, both P.S. 166 on Manhattan's heavily Democratic Upper West Side (Richard Rogers School) and P.S. 57 in hevily Republican Staten Island (the Hubert Humphrey School) will temporarily be renamed the Bloomberg for Vice President School until the completion of both parties' nominating conventions. Both schools will return to their former names as of November 5, 2008, the day after Election Day.

Mr. Klein noted in closing that, should any private citizen be interested in having a school named after himself or herself, all that was necessary was to make a seven-figure donation to the New York State Republican Party or to one’s particular New York State Republican State Senator or Assemblyman of choice.