"Bursting at the Seams?"

"Building is out of control in this town!" Okay. "Why must there be apartment buildings on every available piece of land?" I hear you. "We can't keep adding houses everywhere; the schools are bursting at the seams!" Now you've lost me.

Counting the number of students in the schools and predicting how many there will be tomorrow - or five years from now - is fundamental to a well-run district. So why is it so hard? And why is there so much confusion?

After nearly sixteen years of service as a school board member in New Jersey, I conclude that the confusion is on purpose.

Education of the K-12 variety has become an industry. And the industry needs customers. Unlike other industries - where a dwindling customer base would be taken care of by a free market - the government schools have no pressure to scale down. All they want to do is keep the train on the tracks. If enrollment isn't growing, it's hard to justify increased spending - so they have to pretend.

The Hillsborough Township, New Jersey School District currently has 7,226 students across its nine schools. That is 435 FEWER students than the peak year when there were 7,661 students in the district. That was 2005 - EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO. 

Yet I constantly hear that the schools are "bursting at the seams." How can this be? More importantly, why did the rampant development in the town over the past twenty years not cause a tremendous INCREASE in enrollment but instead result in a DECREASE? And finally, why are there so many that don't know the truth?

We can answer the second question first with what sounds like a copout - the "rampant development" just didn't happen. The question is flawed. In this case, you actually can't believe your lying eyes. Hillsborough's population increased by a relatively paltry 6,000 between 2000 and 2020. That's a mere 18%. As a comparison, between 1970 and 1990, the township's population increased from 11,000 to nearly 29,000 - an 18,000-person, 160% increase! Those were the decades of "rampant development" - not the past 20 years.

Even so, shouldn't a population increase of 6,000 add some students to the school system? Yes - and it did, at first. School enrollments increased between 2000 and 2005 before heading in the other direction and bottoming out at 7,126 in 2015. Birth rates in Hillsborough simply did not keep pace with all of the new bedrooms being built. In 2002, the Auten Road Elementary School was doubled in size to become the Auten Road Intermediate School (grades 5-6), and the final of three major additions was completed at the high school, doubling its capacity from the original building of 1969. There have been no projects to increase school capacity since that time.

So, if there are 435 fewer students enrolled now than in 2005, and school capacity has remained the same, why is there a prevalent narrative that says the schools are overcrowded? The answer is that over the past 18 years, the state has changed the definition of full capacity. In other words, you no longer have what you paid for.

For example, in 2001, when voters went to the polls to approve the construction projects at ARIS and the high school, they were told that the project would increase the high school capacity from 2,100 to 2,600 students. Yet today, the state uses something called Facility Efficiency Standards to calculate that the current high school has a capacity of 1,517. Somewhere along the line, the residents of Hillsborough have lost space for over 1,000 students. That is space that they paid for - and it's all gone. 

The same is true of every school in the district. What we thought were elementary schools with a maximum enrollment of 600 are now down to an FES maximum of around 400. This is a real kick to longtime residents who paid for the schools to be built and expanded numerous times.

One last note...over the years, Hillsborough has commissioned demographic studies to predict and plan for future enrollment. Despite the fact that their entire business is built on PREDICTION, they have a mountain of excuses when their prognostication fails. In Hillsborough's case, they consistently predict a far more significant increase in school-aged children than what actually occurs - and they are resistant to any retroactive studies to see how their predictions have fared in the past. Another board member and I tried several times to get a demographer to look back on past predictions and hold themselves to account but faced nothing but poor excuses. 

The 2018 Enrollment Projection and Facility Utilization Study predicted an enrollment of 7,723 students for the 2023-24 school year. As reported at a December 2023 school board meeting, current enrollment is 7,226.

A New High School for Hillsborough? Part Two

In Part One I wrote about how, in the final years of my tenure on the Hillsborough Township Board of Education, there was a big push to do something about the outdated, overcrowded high school. The first question I asked when this subject came up was, "If a school with a capacity for 2,400 students has fewer than 2,400 students enrolled, how can it be overcrowded?"

The school is overcrowded in two ways that are tied together. Firstly, we can measure the capacity of the school by the number of classrooms. If a school has eighty classrooms designed for 30 students each, that gives us a maximum capacity of 2,400. The issue is that we don't use classrooms in the same way we did fifty years ago. Some classrooms will need to have fewer students - there is no getting around it.

Secondly, the basic infrastructure is too small. A school constructed fifty-four years ago with a limited ability for expansion was soon expanded far beyond that. That means the hallways are too small with several choke points and limited routes to get from one area to another - especially with the current enrollment. And common areas such as the cafeteria are overcrowded.

The "unlimited money" solution to this problem is to erect a new 2500-plus capacity high school on a new site and turn the current high school into a 6-7-8 middle school - thereby reducing the number of students in the building to fewer than 1800 and relieving the congestion in the hallways and the strain on the bathrooms, cafeteria, gyms, auditorium, and other common areas.

Setting aside the money issue (likely to be an immediate $1,000 increase on everyone's annual tax bill) the question becomes where to build a new school. The current high school site has many advantages. One is that it is centrally located. It also has good access to roads - three in fact! I know that some bemoan its location on the busy Amwell Road, but imagine if the school was tucked into a quiet residential development at the end of a cul-de-sac. 

The suggestion to build a new high school at the site of the former GSA Depot was explored in 1995 and has come up again from time to time as the land has been cleaned up and is available for development. But are there any other solutions? Can anything be done on the current high school site to alleviate the issues?

I have a few ideas - this is one:

1. Acquire the land at the GSA Depot.
2. Relocate the practice fields and baseball and softball diamonds to the GSA Depot.
3. Construct a cart path between the high school and the GSA Depot.
4. Build a new arts center/auditorium at the vacated soccer fields.
5. Reconfigure the current auditorium and music instruction rooms into classroom space.
6. Put a sign up at the GSA Depot site reading, "Future Home of Hillsborough High School".
7. Wait.

This simplified plan doesn't address all of the details and doesn't solve all of the issues but it plans for the future while buying time to see where enrollment goes. A new high school can be erected later. A centrally-located high-seating capacity arts center can always be used even after the current high school is converted into a middle school.