This is really upsetting. I didn't go to TJHS, but the sense I got from the three people I know who did was that it had that critical mass of nerdy science-and-tech-obsessed teenagers.

At least in Canada, it's more common to have smaller programs operating within a larger high school - my program was 30 people, mostly humanities kids with maybe 8-10 STEM kids. There wasn't anything approaching that sort of critical mass. Plus, as a subset of a smaller school, you still had to play politics with everyone else. TJHS always sounded like one of the only places that, somehow, did have that critical mass and managed to maintain it for decades.

Maybe this sort of public school is just politically infeasible now - which is a pity, since locating and nurturing the talents of disadvantaged youth benefits all of us.