Do colleges care about the classes you took in high school?

Asked by Feta (930) January 11th, 2014 from iPhone

I’ve taken all AP courses available at my school and meet the graduation requirements with a 3.9 GPA (made a 92 in Geometry).

However, I want to go to an art school for photography and illustration and I’ve only taken one art class.
The reasoning for this is because I go to a very small, very poor (literally, even though it’s public we have to give the teachers class fees every year, it’s never more than $20 per class but still…I’ve also had classes that don’t have enough text books to go around), school with limited space for students in classes, meaning every time I’ve tried to take art, I’ve been told the class was already full (of kids who aren’t even in the art path…I was told by the administration that Art is mainly reserved for seniors because seniors should have an easy last year of high school).
My school makes us choose a career path as freshman and they build our schedules based on that, so naturally mine was art.
I was informed this year that they weren’t sure I could graduate if I kept the art path because I needed 4 art credits and rather than bumping some kid who wanted an easy class out of Art, they tried to stick me in drama and I refused. So, the solution was to change my career path to “humanities” which basically means history classes, and since they’d managed to give me every history/social studies class available at my school in lieu of art, I met the graduation requirements for Humanities with an astounding 7 history credits (only 3 required).

I didn’t really have a problem with this…because I do art at home anyway and the class at school is basically a glorified crafts class.
However, I was reading the requirements for most selective colleges in our student handbook and it says that colleges generally want to see that you took elective classes pertaining to your career of choice.

Well, what are they going to think about my single art class?

I’m double majoring for the sake of having a “Plan-B” career, but I mainly want to be a photographer and my high school doesn’t offer a photography course simply because the teacher died a few years ago and they don’t have the funds to replace her.

This school frankly sucks in many other ways and I’ve begged my parents to please homeschool me, but they can’t afford it and also find me having a social life more important than my actual education (I might add that my social life is lacking in school anyway because I refuse to associate with the drug dealers and down-home hookers that populate it).

So I don’t know…has my high school lessened the chances of me getting into art school or will my portfolio and (high) test scores be enough?

I’m looking at Tisch in NYC and I read that the author Frank McCourt got into NYU with only 8 years of education and the fact that he read a lot of books and was pretty smart.
I mean…I’ve got more than that.