Besides not at least being somewhat racially integrated like Bayside High School had been in the Fall of 1962, Broad Ripple High School differed from Bayside H.S. in other ways. So the experience of attending Broad Ripple, as a high school student in 1963 and the Spring of 1964, differed from the experience of attending Bayside in the Fall of 1962.
Compared to Bayside, Broad Ripple was much less crowded with students, despite it being a 4-year high school of 9th-grade freshmen, 10th-grade sophomores, 11th-grade juniors and 12th-grade seniors. Within the Indianapolis public school system in the early 1960's, students attended a grammar school until the end of the 8th-grade and then began attending high school in the 9th-grade as freshmen. In New York City's public school system in the early 1960's, however, you usually only entered a real public high school as a 10th-grader and just spent only three years as a public high school student.
Unless you maybe went to one of the specialized elite public high schools (like Brooklyn Tech, Bronx High School of Science, Stuyvesant High School, Hunter High School or Music and Art), a Catholic parochial high school or a public vocational high school in New York City, you first attended an elementary school until the end of the sixth grade and a junior high school until the end of the ninth grade. So if you were seeking either an academic high school diploma (that you needed to get if you planned to apply to college), a commercial high school diploma (if you just planned to enter the 9-to-5 skyscraper business office work world without looking to go to college) or a general high school diploma (if you just planned to get some kind of blue-collar factory job or join the U.S. military if you were a man, or just get married and have children rapidly if you were a woman), you usually only entered a real public high school as a 10th-grader.
Yet even though Broad Ripple H.S. included a freshman class of about 400 students, as well as sophomore, junior and senior classes of about 400 students each and Bayside H.S. only included sophomores, juniors and seniors, because Bayside was located in a much more heavily populated area of the United States--New York City's borough of Queens--than Indianapolis, in the early 1960's it had so many students attending the school that it was a "triple session" school.
What Bayside H.S. being a high school on "triple session" meant in the early 1960's was that some of Bayside's students began their school day at 8 a.m. or 8:15 a.m. in the morning in what was called "zero period," a second group of Bayside students began their school day at 9 a.m. or 9:15 a.m. in what was called "first period" and a third group of Bayside students began their school dat at 10:30 or 10:45 a.m. in what was called "third period." As a consequence, if you began your school day at zero period, your school day would end after 7th period at around 2:15 p.m., If you began your school day at first period, your school day would end at the end of the 8th period, at around 3 p.m. And if you began your school day at 3rd period, your school day wouldn't end until after the "10th period" at around 4:30 p.m..
In contrast, at Broad Ripple H.S., all students just reported at the same time to their first period class at 8:15 a.m. each day; and at Broad Ripple all the students were released from classes at the end of the 8th or 9th period by 3 p.m., at the same time.
Another difference between Bayside H.S. and Broad Ripple H.S. was that Bayside was so overcrowded with students in the early 1960's that a portion of each year's entering 10th-grade sophomore class at Bayside was assigned to attend classes as a group not inside the Bayside H.S. building, but in a different, separate building a few blocks away, that was called "The Annex."
Were it not for the fact that the Bayside H.S. administration clerks assumed that, since I had been enrolled in a group music class as a 9th-grader at Jr. H.S. 67 learning to play the cello, I also was going to want to be in a group music class at Bayside H.S. as a sophomore learning to play the cello well enough to become a member of the high school orchesta by my junior or senior year, I would have ended up spending my first term as a high school sophomore in Bayside's annex, and not in Bayside's main building.
So even though, by the time I entered Bayside H.S. as a sophomore in September 1962, I was now into the saxophone and not the cello, I felt happy that the assumption by the school administration clerk that I wanted to be still studying a string instrument in high school had enabled me to avoid being assigned to attend "the annex;" which I felt would just provide a sophomore year high school experience too much like still being in junior high school. And which would deny me the opportunity of having an individual program of classes, where I would have a greater chance of having different classmates each period than I would, if I just mostly moved from classroom to classroom each period with the same group of 30 classmates in "the annex."
Of course, as soon as I received my program card on the first day of high school, I got my program changed, in a way I no longer can recall. So, instead of being in a morning music group class studying cello, I was in a group band class practicing saxophone.
Yet, unluckily, during my first term as a sophomore at Bayside I was still one of the 10th-graders who began school at the 10:30 or 10:45 hour third period class and whose last 10th period class didn't end until around 4:30 p.m.. So starting to attend Broad Ripple in early 1963, where I reported for class at 8:00 or 8:15 a.m. each day and got freed from school by 3 p.m. each was was what I liked more; although the 10:30 or 10:45 start of my Bayside High school day did allow me to sleep an hour longer in the morning. Since I didn't have to catch one of the crowded NY Transit Authority city buses that picked up the Bayside H.S. sophomores, who lived in the Beech Hills and Deepdale garden apartment developments in my Douglaston-Little Neck neighborhood, for the 30 minute bus ride to Bayside H.S., until around 9:30 or 9:40 a.m..
At Bayside H.S., daily attendance was marked for each student during their 15-minute homeroom period; and when I attended Bayside the 15-minute sophomore homeroom period for all the sophomores who began classes in the third period, was located in the school's auditorium, rather than in a classroom. Each "homeroom teacher" was assigned to take the attendance of 4 or 5 rooms in which their "homeroom class" of around 30 students sat.
While I no longer can recall whether or not students had to report to a "homeroom" for attendance taking each day at Broad Ripple, I recall having to attend homeroom at Bayside for a reason other than it was in the school auditorium and not in a classroom: A white guy of Italian-American background named Alfred, whose assigned auditorium seat was next to mine because his last name also began with "F", who ad apparently attended Catholic parochial school for 8 years before entering Bayside H.S., apparently tried to ridicule me and another guy sitting in our row, who was also of Jewish religious background, by repeating our names aloud in an imitation stereotyped Yiddish accent a number of times. In a way that made me feel he was somewhat anti-Semitic on an inter-personal level.
Prior to sitting next to Alfred in my 10th-grade homeroom class at Bayside, I had never personally experienced even any hint of inter-personal anti- semitism during a day in the local public schools. Maybe because, until I entered the 10th grade, about 90 to 95 percent of the students in the public schools I had attended were also of Jewish religious background.
