Brick Schools Planning Demographic Study Of Population, Student Needs

Does Brick Township have enough room for all of its students -- current and future? And how can it better place programs to serve its students?

Those are the questions facing the district as it tries to plan for an influx of residents due to the addition of two new housing developments and the potential for a third one before the Planning Board that is on hold due to legal wrangling.

Brick’s enrollment

Trees are being cleared on Brick Boulevard for the project called The Boulevard at Brick, a 120-unit apartment complex on Brick Boulevard that has been described as “upscale.” In addition, New Visions at Brick, with 44 apartments and 170 townhouses, has begun selling homes and renting apartments at the complex off Chambersbridge Road behind the post office and the ShopRite-Kohl’s shopping center. A third potential complex at Jack Martin Boulevard, Burrsville Road and Route 88 is on hold pending some legal wrangling.’

Still, the potential influx of students is not something the district is ignoring.

At the Oct. 22 Board of Education meeting, interim Superintendent Richard Caldes said the district is in the process of defining specifications to hire a demographer to do a full study on the student population of the township. The demographer wouldn’t be looking solely at sheer numbers of students, but Caldes said the intent is to look more closely, so the district can plan for special program needs as well.

Caldes said by telephone on Monday afternoon that he and the administrative staff have been looking at proposals from demographers, seeking one that will do a very detailed analysis, and hopes to be ready to recommend one by the end of the year. The critical part is not simply calculating student population growth, but getting an analysis of what kinds of students the district will have.

“We are becoming specialized in a lot of different areas, with the different groups of students that we have,” he said at the school board meeting, adding that he said back in the spring that a demographic study is needed. “We have 9,600-some students in the district. We need to take care of each student’s needs.”

Right now, he said he has been taking “a Band-Aid approach,” placing programs in ways that Caldes said aren’t necessarily efficient. One program has been placed at Warren Wolf Elementary School “because that’s in the middle of town,” he said. But other programs are sited where there’s room.

“The DD (developmentally disabled) program is at Lanes Mill,” he said, which means that for a student who lives on the far east side of town, such as out Mantoloking Road, there’s extra transportation costs.

The fact that most of the district’s schools were built in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s means that the classrooms were constructed to hold 30 students -- a class size that most school districts avoid for regular classes because it is not seen as conducive to learning. And those rooms far exceed the allowable class size for some of the specialized programs.

“In a way we are wasting space in some schools,” Caldes said, while others are overcrowded.

The ultimate goal it not to build new buildings but instead to restructure classroom space and usage. That, of course, will be affected by where and how much growth there is, he said.

A possible influx of students from new developments could have “a huge impact on our elementary and middle schools,” he said.

“We have to look at all of our options,” Caldes said. “The town is changing.”