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years of my tenure on the Hillsborough Township Board of Education, there was a big push to do something about the outdated, overcrowded high school.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.