neglect in the late 1980s after the decade long stimulating and long leadership of the "New City College" program, curriculum and admissions standards under Principal Solomon Lausch, by the early 1990s, to the mid-1990s, with an increase in funding from the BCPS school system, and the selection of the high school to be one of the few to sub-contract out its maintenance and support functions to the Educational Alternatives, Inc. private system (E.A.I.) who were already academically operating and running several other city elementary and middle schools under an experimental but controversial contract with the BCPS and the school board. The B.C.C. began to experience a turnaround under new principal and former attorney, Dr. Joseph Wilson brought in during 1994 after a nationwide job search. Administrators re-strengthened academic standards and, in 1998, the school began offering the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Program. By the beginning of the decade of the 2000s, City College was experiencing an academic resurgence. During this period the school was recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as a National Blue Ribbon School, was listed as one of the top high schools in the United States by Newsweek magazine. Early years The creation of a male high school "in which the higher branches of English and classical literature should be taught exclusively" was authorized unanimously by the Baltimore City Council on March 7, 1839. A townhouse of probably two stories with a sloped roof and dormer window structure on what was then known as Courtland Street (now east side of "Preston Gardens", built in the late 1910s with terraced and bermed flower beds with shrubs and monumental staircases along St. Paul Street and St. Paul Place, of five square blocks between East Centre Street in the north and East Lexington Street to the south, as Baltimore's first downtown "urban renewal" project, which unfortunately resulted in the razing of hundreds of beautiful, but run-down, then neglected Federal, Georgian, and Greek Revival architecture-styled townhomes and classical business structures that would be considered to be saved under the "historic preservation" standards today) was acquired to serve as the home of the new high school. The school opened its doors that Fall on October 20, 1839 with 46 students. Enrollment was restricted to white, male students of Baltimore City who had completed grammar school and passed an entrance exam. Additional student applicants from the surrounding rural (and later suburban) Baltimore