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I live in Manalapan and have since 2002. I have been in NJ since 1972 and have seen the area change quite a bit. Manalapan overall is a nice area to raise a family. The schools are pretty good, but I've heard bad things about the high school. My children are still in elementary, so I have no personal experience. I'm well aware that drugs are all over, but our high school is known for having higher drug usage. Crime is also escalating here. We always had a few robberies, but now I'm hearing about several in the past two months. This may be happening all over, not sure. The area is very convenient but we pay a price for it. Rt. 9 is jammed on weekends.
I taught at Lafayette Mills School in Manalapan for one year (2006-7) and I can tell you I would choose a different area, based on my experiences there and the experiences of a few former residents I know personally who used to live there but have since left. At first glance it may not appear to be very different from any other quiet, peaceful bedroom community. Don't be fooled. The schools, while they may appear fine on paper, have had several issues in the year I was there and the student culture is "unsavory" to say the least - may of them have two working parents who are not at home to discipline their children and in turn just hand them over anything they wish and thus end up as spoiled brats whose behavior is usually worse than chidren in some inner-city districts. And the parents were even worse when meeting with them - many of them your typical greasy-looking, cigarette-smoking "guidettes" in shabby pink sweatsuits with deep "exaggerated" Brooklyn/Staten Island accents, "ice" in their voices and inability to maintain any standard conversation, let alone eye-contact. People in this town generally come across as snotty, but they lack ordinary social skills. Probably doped up on something illegal, which you will never know about.
There is a growing crime problem there as the above person said, usually involving these "wild" adolescents who again appear to be from 1/2-decent families, but due to the absence of parenting, have become deviants who are out all hours of the night in groups either making trouble at local shopping centers or finding ways to buy hard drugs. The town is fairly well-known for its drug epidemic and has been in the news for it on multiple occasions. Litter, garbage - mostly used condoms and water bottles filled with urine - strewn all over the roads. Commute is very frustrating due to lack of mass transit and you are a slave to Route 9 which is a parking lot, as are all the roads that lead to it. And it will only get worse. Cost of living is outrageously high - even by NJ standards - with overly-inflated prices of homes and just about everything else.
One of my friends son went to CBA about 20 years ago and a number of the kids there were doing drugs.
Money just allows you to buy more and better drugs. Crime and drugs are in every corner of NJ and don't let anyone kid you that it's not.
Good point. I remember a few years ago Ridgewood was on two "top ten" lists--one for the percentage of its HS grads that go to college, and one for the rate of drug use in the high school. Kids with money can afford drugs, and any dealer with half a brain knows that.
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