Furness High School has a long history as a neighborhood school in South Philadelphia, beginning in 1914 when the school was completed as Furness Junior High School. The school transitioned to a senior high school in the 1980s. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989. Even one hundred years later, the area surrounding the school has remained largely the same, consistently dominated by a white, blue-collar population.
While the school's immediate neighborhood continues to be occupied by a majority white residential population, the demographics of Furness High School are much more diverse and do not reflect the surrounding neighborhood. As you can see from the maps and charts below, the neighborhood surrounding Furness is 75-90% white. This past school year, Furness's student body was only 8.8% white. Multiple teacher interviews about the school's demographics confirmed this data. The Notebook reported in 2010 that "almost 3/4 of high school aged students living within Furness's boundary opted for other schools, mostly magnets and charters." Many of the neighborhood students also choose attend Catholic schools. Furness is the most diverse neighborhood school in Philadelphia, with students from thirty-two different nations. The school's diversity reflects the diversity of other neighborhoods in Philadelphia.
In an interview with a recently retired Furness teacher, the teacher said that one of the biggest recent changes at the school has been the influx of English Language Learner. According to an article in the Philadelphia Tribune in May 2013, twenty-two different languages are spoken within the school. Over half of Furness's student body are ELL and frequently commute from South Philadelphia on the other side of Broad Street, or to the north around Chinatown. As a result, the number of ESOL teachers and "sheltered" classes at Furness have increased dramatically. ESOL students have separate classes from native students in addition to separate lunch times, and as a result the students have little opportunity to integrate between groups within the school.
Looking at the student body more closely...