In 1995, Hillsborough High School was beginning to become overcrowded. The 26-year-old high school was 150 students beyond its 1,350-student capacity with no end in sight. Besides, the school already seemed outdated.
The school board believed that the solution to this problem was to build a brand-new high school and to reconfigure the other schools - notably making the 1969 high school a 6-8 school. I have written about that plan - and the two rejected referenda that followed - and you can read about it here. Since then, the current high school has been expanded twice to its current nominal capacity of 2,400 students - but the talk of building a new high school persists.
A few years ago, a new fancy high school proposal was floated. A presentation by the high school principal condemned the current high school - once again - as being overcrowded and outdated.
There is no doubt that the two additions to the high school in the late 90s and early 2000s while adding classrooms, did not adequately address the common area issues. The cafeteria, the hallways, etc. are still small. Imagine building a skyscraper with just enough elevator capacity to reach the top floor, and then adding 50 more floors on top of that with no ability to build more elevator shafts. It won't work.
One of the reasons that the first 1995 high school referendum was rejected was that people objected to the site at the corner of Beekman Lane and New Center Road. They were concerned that the site was too far from the population centers of the 54-square-mile township and worried about what bringing sewers to that part of town would do to its rural character.
Before the second 1995 referendum, the school board published a map denoting the 15 properties in Hillsborough that were considered for the high school, and why 14 of them were rejected. The referendum still failed.
During one of my final years on the school board - 25 years after the failed referendum - I accompanied the superintendent on a site visit to two of the rejected sites from 1995. One was the site bounded by North Willow Road on the west, Hamilton Road on the north, and Amwell Road on the south. This property was rejected by the school board in 1995 because of the presence of a major gas pipeline and substantial wetlands. Those conditions were unchanged in 2021.
The other site I visited was the Belle Mead GSA Depot. Since 1995, the southern half of the tract had been purchased by Somerset County and became Mountain View Park. Now the northern part of the property was controlled by the Hillsborough Township Committee and was available for development.
The difference with this property was that there had been significant changes since it was rejected by the school board in 1995 for "environmental reasons". The property had undergone a multimillion-dollar cleanup and was just awaiting final testing to be given the "all-clear".
So...what to do? I will give you my thoughts in Part Two!
