How are schools assigned in NJ? (Toms River, Orange: houses, neighborhood, school district)

[rubikrog]

I'm trying to do my initial research and using Trulia, Zillow and Greater schools to get an idea of how the schools are, at least based on Greater School scores as a starting point.

However I am confused. Sometimes I will see multiple middle schools or high schools inside a school district. (I assume it is the school district as I am basing it off of the School and District Borders maps from GreatSchools.org.

Is it safe to say that based on the home address and distance from the school, is where my child will go? I am also assuming that some of these schools I am seeing could be specialized schools which require some type of lottery or test to get in which I guess could explain that.

Thanks

[PDD]

Originally Posted by rubikrog

I'm trying to do my initial research and using Trulia, Zillow and Greater schools to get an idea of how the schools are, at least based on Greater School scores as a starting point.

However I am confused. Sometimes I will see multiple middle schools or high schools inside a school district. (I assume it is the school district as I am basing it off of the School and District Borders maps from GreatSchools.org.

Is it safe to say that based on the home address and distance from the school, is where my child will go? I am also assuming that some of these schools I am seeing could be specialized schools which require some type of lottery or test to get in which I guess could explain that.

Thanks

I NJ all schools are run by the town (which is it's own school district) where they are located so you are correct in that usually you are assigned to the school closest to where you live.

The only schools that are county run are the vocational schools so sometimes you will be assigned to a school further away if that school is the only one that offers the course you are interested in.

You can call any school or town and they can tell you which school will be yours based on your address.

[hrjersey]

Some bigger towns have multiple middle and high schools. For example, Toms River has 3 middle schools and three high schools. Also, South Orange and Maplewood have a combined school district so they have two middle schools but you could technically live in Maplewood and go to a school in South Orange (this is an exception in NJ since most districts are not combined). There are also some magnet high schools which usually draw from the top students in a county but you have to apply to those.

I've seen some interesting districting of "neighborhood" schools, so yes, you could "guess" which school your child will go to but I would verify it with the local Board of Education if you really have your heart set on a particular school within a district.

[46H]

Almost every town in NJ has its own school system.The most common town school systems are K-8(elementary and jr high) or K-12(elementary, jr high, high school). In a K-8/K-12 system you would normally go to the closest schools.

If you are in a K-8 town the town will usually be in a regional high school system. The system could be 2 towns into 1 high school, 3 towns into 2 high schools or some other combination. The advantage of a regional system is that 2 or more towns are sharing the cost of the high school system. This helps support school buildings and programs that smaller towns might not be able to fund and helps smooth out population changes in each town. The downside is that there is another set of administration (on top of the K-8) to financially support with property taxes and there might be funding disparities between the member towns.

There are K-8 systems that are not members of a regional high school system that have sending agreements with another area town or regional high school system. This is due to the small # of high school students. These systems pay per child to the receiving system.

[boater1]

Large districts could have multiple middle schools, even high schools

What specific address within that town/district is determined by the school district.
They draw a line, either side of that line sends kids to a specific school.

Very often, on a yearly basis, they move that line, to balance the population of each school to compensate for more or less kids in one area of the town or not.

So it is very possible that in one year, your child starts in one school, and then in a future year finish at another school.
Districts usually don't like to move the line, because of a usual backlash of the parents, but sometimes it's required to relieve overcrowding in one school and empty classrooms at another.

[NYCresident2014]

I'm going through a similar search- I'm trying to move to Princeton, NJ but it has 3 grade schools and greatschools/zillow/trulia all have the districting lines drawn incorrectly (or not at all). The key to searching based on schools is first to figure out which town you want to live in, then go to that town's school website. If you're lucky, the school's website will have a document or page listing the streets in the town and saying which school each street is assigned to. Then you can draw a circle on zillow to only look at houses in that district.

It's annoying, but light-years ahead of how we used to have to search for houses before the internet!

[Runner7]

Also be aware that zip code boundaries don't always correlate with municipal boundaries. So you could have a zip code "city" of say Freehold, but that can mean Freehold Boro (terrible K-8 schools) or Freehold Twp (solid K-8 schools); both of those municipalities are part of the much larger Freehold Regional High School District, which is good, though rankings do vary for their individual high schools. So do your homework and find out which municipality a property is actually in.