Townsend Harris High School

Townsend Harris leans into its screened, college-prep identity with a full slate of AP courses, a humanities-focused curriculum, and a 100/100 program richness score — meaning it offers something in every category the city tracks, from Robotics and Science Olympiad to Mock Trial and Moot Court. The school is fully screened with a 3.4% offer rate, so the student body arrives academically motivated. The PTA raised about $63 per student last year, well above the district average of roughly $50, which suggests an unusually active parent base for a public high school.

The climate signals here are unusually strong. Total suspensions are zero, parent trust in teachers and in the principal both exceed 93%, and 94% of parents say they're satisfied with the school. Teacher trust in the principal is slightly lower at 89%, and teacher-to-teacher collegial trust sits at 85% — still healthy, but the gap between the very high parent scores and the more measured teacher scores is worth noting. Only 44 teachers responded to the survey, which is a small slice of the staff, so the teacher-side numbers should be read with that limit in mind. Day-to-day, this looks like a calm, family-invested environment where discipline is essentially not an issue.

Townsend Harris's student body is roughly 58% Asian, 17% white, 13% Hispanic, 6% Black, with small shares of multiracial and Native American students — a notably different mix from a typical neighborhood zoned school, which makes sense given that it's a citywide screened program. About 43% of students qualify economically, and 12% have IEPs. The Kew Gardens Hills neighborhood feeding in is largely middle-class (median household income around $85,000, half of homes owner-occupied), but the school pulls from well beyond the immediate area.

Kew Gardens Hills is a settled, middle-class Queens neighborhood where about a quarter of households have children and roughly half of adults hold a bachelor's degree. The median home value is around $564,000 and homeownership sits at 52.5%, giving the area a more suburban feel than most of the city. Poverty is relatively low at 12%, and median household income is in the mid-$80,000s.

There are no subway stations within a 20-minute walk of the school, so families generally rely on buses, driving, or carpools to get here — worth factoring into the commute.