Boston Latin Academy (BLA) is a public exam school founded in 1878 in Boston, Massachusetts providing students in grades 7th through 12th a classical preparatory education.
Originally named Girls' Latin School, it became the first college preparatory high school for girls in the United States. Coeducational since 1972, the school is located in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston and is part of Boston Public Schools (BPS).
Contents
History
Boston Latin Academy (BLA) was established on November 27, 1877 as Girls' Latin School (GLS). The school was founded with the intention to give a classical education and college preparatory training to girls. A plan to admit girls to Public Latin School was formed by an executive committee of the Massachusetts Society for the University Education of Women. Henry Fowle Durant, founder of Wellesley College and an advocate of higher education for women, was instrumental in outlining the legal route for the school to be established. A petition with a thousand signatures was presented to the School Board in September 1877. The board referred the question to the subcommittee on high schools. Ultimately the subcommittee recommended that a separate school for girls be established. John Tetlow was unanimously elected by the School Committee on January 22, 1878 as its first headmaster. On February 4, 1878, Tetlow accepted the first thirty-seven students.
Girls' Latin School opened on West Newton Street in Boston's South End on February 12, 1878 sharing the building with Girls' High School. The thirty-seven students were divided according to aptitude into three classes; the Sixth, Fifth, and Third class. The first graduating class in 1880 included Alice M. Mills, Charlotte W. Rogers, Vida D. Scudder, Mary L. Mason, Alice S. Rollins, and Miriam S. Witherspoon; all six were accepted to Smith College.
In 1888, Abbie Farwell Brown, Sybil Collar, and Virginia Holbrook decided to create a school newspaper. The name Jabberwock was picked from a list that Abbie Farwell Brown submitted. It was taken from "Jabberwocky", the famous nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass. They wrote to Lewis Carroll in London about the name and received a handwritten letter giving them permission for its use. The Jabberwock is one of the oldest school newspapers in the United States.
With the number of students growing each year, in 1898 the school committee moved the first four classes to a building in Copley Square while the rest remained in the older building. In 1907, the school moved into a new building, shared with the Boston Normal School.
Girls' Latin School expanded from approximately 421 students in 1907 to 1,350 students in 1955. The City of Boston had turned over the entirety of the campus to the state in 1952, and when State Teachers College at Boston (the former Normal School) expanded, Girls' Latin School was forced to relocate to the former Dorchester High School for Girls building located in Codman Square.
Heads of School
The title of the school's chief administrator was changed from "Headmaster" to "Head of School" during the 2020–2021 school year.
John Tetlow (1878–1910)
Ernest J. Hapgood (1910–1948)
Louis A. McCoy (1948–1957)
Thomas F. Gately (1957–1965)
William T. Miller (1965–1966)
Margaret C. Carroll (1966–1978)
M. Louise Dooley (acting, 1978–1979)
Christopher Lane (1979–1981)
Douglas Foster (1981–1983)
Robert Binswanger (1983–1991)
Maria Garcia-Aaronson (1991–2009)
Emilia Pastor (2010–2014; 2014–2015)
Richard Sullivan (acting, 2014)
Troy Henninger (2015–2017)
Chimdi Uchendu (2017–2020) (acting until 2018)
Gerald Howland (acting, 2020–2021)
Gavin Smith (2021–present)
Notable alumni
Known class year listed. Non-graduate alumni noted as NG.
Academia, science and technology
Thelma Shoher Baker (1941) – educator and anthropologist
G. Yvonne Young (later Clark) (1947) – female engineering pioneer working at NASA and Tennessee State University
Helen F. Cullen (1936) – mathematician
Anna Parker Fessenden (1914) – botanist and mathematics educator
Mary Welleck Garretson (1914) – geology teacher, paleontology and stratigraphy consultant.
Deborah Tepper Haimo (1939) – mathematician
Barbara Gould Henry (1949) – taught Ruby Bridges, the first African-American child to attend the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, alone in a classroom guarded by Federal Marshals.
Catherine McArdle Kelleher (1956) – political scientist
Maud Worcester Makemson (1908) – astronomer, director of Vassar Observatory
Marie Mercury (1941) – chemist
Martha Jane Bergin (1942) – chemical engineer
Dorothy Quiggle (1922) – MIT Chemical Engineering BSc, MSc, Penn State PhD and professor of chemical engineering.
Rose Rosengard (1959) – musicologist
Evelyn Shakir (1956) – academic and author
Barbara Miller Solomon (1936) – historian, first woman associate dean at Harvard University
Business
Nathan Blecharczyk (2001) – co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Airbnb
Edith Nason Buckingham (NG) – first woman to earn a Ph.D. in zoology at Radcliffe College
Arts and music
Eunice Alberts (1940) – opera singer
Louise Bogan (NG) – poet
Lorraine O'Grady (1952) – conceptual and performance artist
Josephine Preston Peabody (ca. 1892) – poet and dramatist
Athletics
Maribel Vinson Owen (1928) Nine-time US National Figure skating champion and seven-time US National Pairs champion
Senda Berenson Abbott (NG) – women's basketball pioneer and member of Women's Basketball Hall of Fame
Barbara Polk Washburn (1931) – first woman to climb Denali (Mount McKinley)
Film, television and theatre
Florence Fowle Adams (ca. 1881) – dramatic reader, actor, and teacher
Susan Batson (NG) – producer, actress and author
Esther Howard (1911) – actress
Writers and journalists
Abbie Farwell Brown (1891) – writer
Ursula Parrott (1916) best selling author of Ex-Wife
Uri Berenguer (2001) – radio broadcaster
Mary Caroline Crawford (1903) – author, social worker and suffragist
Norma Holzmann (1926) – writer and poet
Theodora Kimball Hubbard (1904) – Author
Mary McGrory (1935) – Pulitzer Prize winning journalist on Nixon's Enemies List.
Carol Natelson Newsom (1964) – photojournist
Sarah-Ann Shaw (1952) – journalist and Boston's first Black female TV reporter
Dorothy West – Harlem Renaissance author
Government and diplomacy
Eileen R. Donovan (1932) – Educator, diplomat, and U.S. Ambassador to Barbados
Judiciary and law
Patti B. Saris (1969) – Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts
Medicine
Hannah Myrick (1892) – physician, superintendent of New England Hospital for Women and Children
Politicians
Daniel J. Hunt (1999) – member of Massachusetts House of Representatives from the 13th Suffolk district
Alice Koerner Wolf (1951) – mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts and member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1996 to 2013, representing the 25th Middlesex District.
Activists
Ruth Batson (1939) – civil rights activist, executive director of the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO)
Ellen Swepson Jackson (NG) – pioneer of Boston school desegregation
Other
Ida Shaw Martin – Founder of the Delta Delta Delta sorority
Athletics
Latin Academy offers a wide variety of sports. The team nickname is Dragons, analogous to the original school mascot the Jabberwock.