Dear Editor:
Hoboken doesn’t need a quarter-billion dollar high school. Hoboken High is tiny and projected by the BOE’s own analysis to remain so. But, tragically, Hoboken High is failing their students. 60% of students are economically disadvantaged. According to the state (2019 data), only 13% (that’s no typo!) of students are proficient in math, and 43% in English. Out of over 400 students only 11 take physics.
Right now, the school is an failure factory, which is why so many families choose the charters and private school instead. They don’t need new fancy athletic facilities, they need to focus on serving the academic needs of the majority of their students.
Asking taxpayers to raise their taxes by over 20%- the largest ask in Hoboken history- with no community input with only weeks over the holidays to consider it is ridiculous. The community should have been involved in the planning, and we should be able to connect the dots between spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and the quality of education delivered to our residents. This is simply a bad idea poorly executed. Vote NO on January 25th.
Jerry Abecrombie
