As of the 2014–15 school year, the school had an enrollment of 751 students and 51.8 classroom teachers (on an FTE basis), for a student–teacher ratio of 14.5:1. There were 104 students (13.8% of enrollment) eligible for free lunch and 24 (3.2% of students) eligible for reduced-cost lunch.[3]
History
W. T. Clarke High School opened in 1957 and was designed by Valley Stream, New York-based Frederic P. Wiedersum Associates.[4] The class of 1959 was the first graduating class, while the class of 1961 was the first graduating class to have spent all four years of high school at Clarke.
The media spotlight was on the school in 1967 when Pete Seeger came to W. T. Clarke High School on March 8, 1967 to sing to an enthusiastic crowd of 1,100 inside the building, and 300 flag-waving protesters outside. The concert was a year late, but it was a victory against censorship. "Mr. Seeger is a highly controversial figure, and as such, injecting him into our community in East Meadow we thought would stir passions, create discord, [and] disharmony ...," the school board said in December 1965, when it canceled a scheduled Seeger appearance. The main question of controversy, the board said, was that on an earlier trip to the Soviet Union, Seeger had sung songs opposing the Vietnam War.[5]
Getting Seeger into the high school auditorium took court battles that went all the way to the State Court of Appeals. The state's highest court said that canceling an earlier invitation because of Seeger's controversial views violated both the state and federal Constitutions.[6]
The Nassau chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union filed an amicus brief to the Court of Appeals, playing a key role in the legal battle.
The high school was again brought into the media spotlight in January 2007 when the school's principal barred a deaf student, John Cave, from bringing a service dog to school. The principal, Timothy Voels, stated that his decision was motivated by concerns over student welfare, such as allergies.[7][8]
The student's parents responded in early February 2007 by filing a $150-million discrimination lawsuit against the East Meadow School District, claiming that school officials subjected the student to "bias, bigotry and prejudice."[9]
^East Meadow Community Concerts Assn v. Board of Education of Union Free School Dist No 3, 49 Misc.2d 643, 268 N.Y.S.2d 221 (1966)(citing "a clipping from the New York Times dated Monday November 25, 1965 containing the picture of the artist Pete Seeger and a news article dated in Moscow October 24, 1965 announcing that an American folk singer, Pete Seeger, sang a Viet Nam protest ballad that day before an auditorium filled with Moscow University students, and had issued the statement 'I wanted to show students here the kind of songs we're singing on college campuses in the United States. It would be wrong to leave this one out.'")
