Ossining High School

Ossining High School (OHS) is a comprehensive public high school located in Ossining, New York, United States, along the Hudson River in northern Westchester County, New York. Serving grades 9 through 12, it is the sole high school within the Ossining Union Free School District. The school serves the entirety of the village of Ossining, portions of the Village of Briarcliff Manor, Town of Ossining, and Town of New Castle, as well as a very small southern portion of the Town of Yorktown. Its building is a historical contributing property within the Downtown Ossining Historic District, which was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 1989. History The present Ossining High School building was designed by James Gamble Rogers in a Collegiate Gothic style, with a warm-toned blend of brick and stone. Construction began in 1928 and was finished the following year; the school was built to replace the smaller Washington School (Ossining, New York), which then became an elementary school for the district. The school was built by Rafael Paiva. The school building has been substantially enlarged in the years since. Between 1968 and 1974, the town of Ossining experienced a string of four race-related disturbances. The final one, on March 13, 1974, began in the school's cafeteria and resulted in several days of school closure, 15 student suspensions, and 19 injuries (including one to a school administrator); a student at the time recalls being locked in a biology classroom for hours, and a curfew for Ossining was implemented for days as a result. This disturbance took place just days after the district's announcement of a plan to redraw elementary school boundaries; at the time, one elementary school was over 60 percent Black, while two others were under 10 percent Black. Many believed this elementary school segregation to be an underlying cause of these racial disturbances. This eventually resulted in the implementation of the "Ossining Plan" for elementary school desegregation in 1981, which assigned each elementary school within the district by grade level instead of neighborhood.