History
The school is considered the brainchild of Dr. John Grieco, and began as a single academy, "The Academy for the Advancement of Science and Technology" (AAST), which shared the current campus with the Bergen County Technical High School. AAST students were first inducted in 1992 for the graduating class of 1996.
In 1997, additional academies opened on the campus: the Academy for Business and Computer Technology (ABCT), the Academy for Engineering Design Technology (AEDT), and the Academy for Medical Science Technology (AMST). The following year, three career institutes, renamed a year later to become academies: the Academy for Culinary Arts (ACA), the Academy for Power and Transportation (APT), and the Academy for Visual Arts and Graphic Communications (AVAGC). Soon, the seven programs were geared less towards career prep and more towards college prep, adopting a liberal arts curriculum with an extra focus on their respective fields.
In 2002, APT was replaced, ABCT was split and renamed the Academy for Business and Finance (ABF) and the Academy for Telecommunications and Computer Science (ATCS), ACA added hotel administration to its coursework and became the Academy for Culinary Arts and Hotel Administration (ACAHA), and AVAGC expanded its scope to include performing arts and became the Academy for Visual and Performing Arts (AVPA).
The school itself also changed its name numerous times, from "Bergen County Regional Academies" to "Bergen Academies", to "Bergen County Academy" and to the present "Bergen County Academies".
In 2001, a major dispute initiated by the Bergen County School Administrators' Association focused on what Paramus Superintendent Janice Dime called "elitism." Several of these districts threatened to withdraw funding from the program. The Bergen County Technical Schools agreed to increase the transparency of the admissions process and enter into talks with a number of sending districts. For the 2006 - 2007 school year, districts paid annual tuition of $6,600 for each student.
Read more about this topic: Bergen County Academies
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A man will not need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)