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Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts

Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, commonly known as LaGuardia or LaGuardia Arts, is a public specialized high school located in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of Manhattan's Upper West Side, adjacent to Lincoln Center. Founded in 1936 by Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia, it is the only New York City specialized high school that admits students by competitive audition rather than standardized test score, and it has produced generations of artists, musicians, dancers, and performers who have shaped American culture. In the Faultlines universe, LaGuardia served as the formative high school for Charlie Rivera and Peter Liu, both of whom entered the Instrumental Music program and whose experiences there -- musical, personal, and medical -- would shape the trajectory of their lives.

History

The school traces its roots to two predecessor institutions. The High School of Music & Art was founded in 1936 during the Great Depression by Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia, who believed that public education should cultivate artistic talent regardless of economic background. The School of Performing Arts was established separately in 1948, providing conservatory-level training in dance, drama, and music for students preparing for professional careers. The two schools merged administratively in 1961 but did not share a building until 1984, when the current facility at 100 Amsterdam Avenue opened adjacent to Lincoln Center -- a location that was both symbolic and practical, placing the school's students within walking distance of the cultural institutions many of them aspired to join.

The school gained widespread cultural recognition through the 1980 film ''Fame'' and its subsequent television adaptation, both inspired by the School of Performing Arts. The ''Fame'' association, while reductive, cemented LaGuardia's reputation in the public imagination as a place where extraordinary young talent was nurtured, tested, and occasionally consumed by the intensity of its own ambition.

Admissions

LaGuardia is unique among New York City's nine specialized high schools in that it does not use the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT). Instead, admission is based on a competitive audition in the student's chosen studio -- Dance, Drama, Art, Vocal Music, Instrumental Music, or Technical Theater -- combined with a review of academic records. The audition process is rigorous: for Instrumental Music, students submit video recordings of a solo piece and scales demonstrating technical proficiency, musicality, and potential.

The audition-based admissions model means that LaGuardia's student body is shaped by talent rather than test-taking ability, which produces a population that is artistically exceptional and demographically diverse in ways that test-based specialized schools often are not. As of the early 2020s, the student body of approximately 2,700 students was roughly 40% White, 21% Asian, 18% Hispanic, 11% Black, and 9% multiracial, with about 32% economically disadvantaged -- a more representative cross-section of New York City than many of its peer institutions.

For Charlie Rivera, the audition was a defining early moment. A thirteen-year-old from Jackson Heights, Queens with a saxophone and a body that was already betraying him in ways he couldn't name, playing well enough to earn admission to one of the most competitive arts programs in the country. The audition didn't ask whether he was sick. It asked whether he could play. He could.

Curriculum and Programs

Instrumental Music

The Instrumental Music program operates on a conservatory model within a public high school framework. Students spend approximately two to three class periods per day in music-related coursework -- performing ensembles, instrument-specific classes, music theory, music history, and electives in areas such as composition and music technology -- in addition to a full academic course load. The dual demands are intentional and unforgiving: LaGuardia produces students who can perform at a professional level AND pass AP exams, and the institution makes no apology for the fact that this requires more hours and more energy than most teenagers possess.

Every instrumental student is required to join a performing ensemble and a class specific to their instrument's musicological classification. The department maintains two symphony orchestras (the LaGuardia Symphony Orchestra for younger students and the LaGuardia Philharmonic for advanced students, the latter requiring a secondary audition), five choirs, four string ensembles, two concert bands, two jazz bands, a chamber group, a gospel choir, a show choir, and an opera company with a pit orchestra. The breadth of ensemble options reflects the department's philosophy that musicianship is built through collaboration, not just individual practice.

The jazz program, directed during Charlie's tenure by Nelson Taveras, held particular significance within the department. Jazz at LaGuardia carried the weight of New York City's jazz history -- the school sat a few blocks from Jazz at Lincoln Center, and the expectation was that students in the jazz ensembles understood they were inheriting a tradition, not just learning a genre.

Academic Program

LaGuardia's academic program runs parallel to its arts curriculum with the same rigor applied to both. Students take standard New York State Regents courses alongside their studio work, and the school consistently ranks in the top 10% of New York State schools for math and reading proficiency. AP courses are available across disciplines, and the academic culture expects excellence in the classroom as well as the rehearsal room.

The result is a school day that begins early and ends late, with students moving between academic classrooms and rehearsal spaces, carrying instruments and backpacks, managing homework and practice schedules, and navigating the particular exhaustion of being asked to be exceptional in two domains simultaneously. For healthy students, this is demanding. For a student with an undiagnosed chronic illness, it was something else entirely.

Academic Maintenance and Probation

Getting into LaGuardia was hard. Staying was harder. The school required students to maintain a minimum GPA to remain enrolled -- a standard conservatory-model policy designed to ensure that students who had earned their spot through audition continued to earn it through academic performance. Students who fell below the threshold were placed on academic probation and given one semester to bring their grades back up. If they didn't, they were counseled out -- transferred back to their zoned school, their seat at LaGuardia given to the next name on the waitlist.

The policy was academically defensible and humanly ruthless. A "regular" class at LaGuardia carried the rigor of an AP course at a traditional high school, and students were expected to maintain that level of academic performance while simultaneously spending two to three hours daily in conservatory-level arts training, plus after-school rehearsals, weekend performances, and the unofficial expectation that they practiced their instrument every day. The workload assumed a student who could go home, eat dinner, do three hours of homework, practice for an hour, sleep, and wake up ready to do it again. It did not assume a student who went home, threw up, lay on the bathroom floor for forty-five minutes, attempted homework while dizzy, fell asleep at the desk, and woke up at 5 AM having completed half the assignment.

For Charlie Rivera, the academic maintenance requirement was a constant, grinding pressure that compounded every other pressure in his life. Every sick day was not just a day of missed music -- it was a day of missed academic content that he had to make up or risk falling below the threshold. Every bad body week was a week where assignments piled up faster than his depleted energy could clear them. The threat of losing his spot at LaGuardia -- the only school where his music mattered, the only place where Nelson Taveras put a chair by the door and handed him solos and expected everything -- was a weight that sat on top of every other weight his undiagnosed body was carrying. By sophomore year, the cumulative pressure of maintaining grades, maintaining attendance, maintaining the performance of wellness that the institution required, and maintaining his sanity in a body that was failing without explanation became unsustainable. The suicide attempt was not caused by any single factor, but the academic maintenance requirement was one of the walls that closed in.

Culture and Environment

LaGuardia's culture is the culture of young artists under pressure. The hallways are louder than most schools -- not with chaos but with practice. Saxophone scales bleed through closed doors. A dancer stretches in a stairwell. Someone is always rehearsing something. The building hums with the particular energy of several thousand teenagers who are all very good at something and who are all surrounded, for the first time in many of their lives, by peers who are equally good.

The competitive dynamics are real but nuanced. LaGuardia students compete less against each other than against an internalized standard of excellence that the institution cultivates from the first audition. The pressure is not "be better than the person next to you" but "be as good as this place demands," and the distinction matters because it produces a culture that is simultaneously supportive and merciless. Students celebrate each other's successes and hold each other to standards that would be unreasonable anywhere else but feel normal here because everyone is operating at the same intensity.

The social landscape is shaped by studios. Instrumental Music students cluster together. Drama students form their own ecosystem. Dancers move through the building differently -- literally, physically, the way they occupy space. Cross-studio friendships exist but the primary social unit is the studio, and within Instrumental Music, the primary social unit is the ensemble. The jazz band is a family in the way that all small ensembles are families: intimate, competitive, dependent on each other, and capable of producing both extraordinary music and extraordinary interpersonal damage.

The diversity of the student body creates a social environment where code-switching is common, where multiple languages are spoken in the cafeteria, and where cultural identity is simultaneously celebrated and complicated by the institution's implicit assumption that art transcends background -- an assumption that is generous in theory and occasionally erasive in practice.

Accessibility and Inclusion

Disability Policy vs. Practice

LaGuardia's official disability accommodations operated through the New York City Department of Education's standard framework: Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) and 504 plans, extended testing time, modified attendance policies, access to school counselors and psychologists. The building itself, opened in 1984, met ADA compliance standards for physical accessibility.

The gap between policy and practice was most visible in how the conservatory culture interacted with disability accommodation. A 504 plan could excuse absences, but it couldn't prevent an ensemble director from perceiving those absences as lack of commitment. Extended testing time helped with academics, but no accommodation existed for the physical demands of three hours of daily music practice on a body that was failing. The institution's ethos -- excellence through discipline, mastery through repetition, artistry through relentless effort -- was not designed for a body that could not be disciplined into compliance.

For Charlie Rivera, the gap was the space between teachers who understood and teachers who didn't. Some faculty read his absences as illness. Others read them as unreliability. Some saw a kid who played brilliantly when he showed up and wondered why he couldn't just show up more often. The institution could accommodate a diagnosis on paper. What it could not accommodate was the absence of a diagnosis -- a student who was clearly unwell but had no medical documentation to explain why, which meant that every absence, every early departure, every class spent sitting down when he should have been standing was subject to interpretation rather than protected by policy.

The school's counseling services were available but overwhelmed -- standard for a New York City public school serving nearly three thousand students. Mental health support existed in theory. In practice, a student in crisis was more likely to be noticed by a perceptive teacher than by the institutional safety net.

Notable Faculty

Nelson Taveras

Nelson Taveras was the jazz ensemble director during Charlie Rivera and Peter Liu's time at LaGuardia. An Afro-Dominican musician who had come up through New York City's jazz scene before moving into education, Taveras brought to the rehearsal room the particular authority of a man who had played the music professionally and chosen to teach it because he believed the tradition deserved stewardship, not just performance.

Taveras's approach to Charlie Rivera became one of the most significant teacher-student dynamics in Charlie's pre-Juilliard life. He was not the teacher who made speeches about believing in Charlie. He was the teacher who put a chair by the rehearsal room door so Charlie could sit without asking. Who didn't penalize absences but also didn't lower expectations -- when Charlie was present, Taveras expected everything, and Charlie understood that the expectation was itself a form of belief. Who kept giving Charlie solos even when other faculty questioned whether a student who missed as much school as Charlie did deserved the first chair.

Taveras never discussed Charlie's illness directly with him. The conversations happened through music: a solo assigned, a part arranged to accommodate a seated player, a nod from across the rehearsal room that said I see you, I know what this costs you, play. The belief was in the actions, not the words, and for a kid who had been told so many words that turned out to be empty -- by doctors, by classmates, by a medical system that couldn't find anything wrong -- a teacher who communicated through what he did rather than what he said was the only kind of mentor Charlie could have trusted.

Years later, when Charlie's career had made him one of the most visible musicians in the country, he would credit Taveras in interviews not for inspiring him or believing in him but for "never making me explain why I needed to sit down." The phrasing was precise. Charlie didn't need someone to believe in him. He needed someone to stop requiring proof.

Notable Alumni

Charlie Rivera

Charlie Rivera attended LaGuardia from 2021 to 2025 as an Instrumental Music major (saxophone). His years at the school encompassed his undiagnosed chronic illness, his suicide attempt at age sixteen, his first experience of public vulnerability through the "What It's Really Like Being Me" YouTube video, and the daily reality of commuting from Jackson Heights, Queens to Lincoln Square on a body that fought him every step of the way. LaGuardia gave Charlie the conservatory foundation that would carry him to Juilliard and beyond, and it also gave him his first sustained experience of the gap between institutional promises and institutional practice -- a gap he would spend his career trying to close.

Peter Liu

Peter Liu attended LaGuardia during the same period as Charlie, also in the Instrumental Music program (bass). Peter and Charlie's relationship -- which began as friendship and became romantic during their time at the school -- was shaped by the particular intimacy of being in the same ensemble, the same hallways, the same pressure cooker. Peter was present for Charlie's worst moments at LaGuardia, including the aftermath of the suicide attempt, and his experience of watching someone he loved suffer without adequate institutional support would inform his own trajectory as a musician and person.

Reputation and Legacy

LaGuardia's reputation rests on the tension between its extraordinary artistic output and the human cost of sustaining it. The school has produced generations of artists who credit it as the crucible that forged their professional identity, and an equal number who describe the experience as formative in ways that were not always kind. The conservatory model works brilliantly for students whose bodies and minds can sustain the pace. For students who cannot -- because of disability, chronic illness, mental health crises, poverty, or any of the other realities that the conservatory model was not designed to accommodate -- LaGuardia is a place that sees your talent clearly and your struggle imperfectly.

The school's location adjacent to Lincoln Center remains both aspirational and literal: LaGuardia students walk past the institutions they hope to join, perform in the same neighborhood where the world's best musicians work, and absorb through proximity the understanding that this is where the path leads if they are good enough and lucky enough and, in some cases, well enough to follow it.

Organizations and Collectives Schools New York City Instrumental Music Charlie Rivera Peter Liu