Sayreville vs South Amboy vs Monroe

March 31st marks the 5 year anniversary of my moving to Monroe Township. Monroe Township is about as far south as you can get in Middlesex County, in fact our middle school has a 609 area code! Prior to moving to Monroe I lived in South Amboy a tiny town that is 1.9 squares miles, right next to Sayreville where I grew up and attended high school.

Prior to buying my house I looked at a lot of school report cards. At the time my sons were in first grade and 5th grade. I looked at whatever I could find for the district as a whole and the elementary schools but a lot of the stats for a district are based on their high schools so I looked at the high schools as well. Since I have been teaching for a while (cough, cough) I knew a few ins and outs of these report cards and knew that sometimes the figures can be decieving, but I also knew that there was a lot of information to be gained as well.

For example class size is the result of counting every student in a school and dividing it by the total number of classes. So if the school has a lot of small (usually special ed) classes it lowers the average and this does not mean your child will have classes that size. Same is true for computers - the number is simply how many students there are per computer, no information is given as to the availablilty of the computers to any group of students. Schools do specify where the computers are located, in classrooms, labs or mobile carts. If it's a choice between 1 computer in every classroom or all computers in labs, students get more use usually out of computer labs since only 1 or 2 students can work on a computer in the classroom at one time and usually the one computer is reserved for the use of the teacher.

I haven't really studied these 3 sets of report cards in a few years so I wanted to see how the statistics have changed but my last 3 attempts to access the report card section of the NJDOE site has crashed Internet Explorer so I'm not going to do that again! Instead I'll tell you what I looked at. First, I looked at the percentage of students choosing to persue their education past HS. At the time the majority of students from all 3 schools were continuing their education but South Amboy had the lowest % going to a 4 year college and Monroe had the highest. This fit in with what I knew about all 3 towns. South Amboy is the most blue collar of the three and Monroe is the most affluent. I also looked at the ratio of administrators to students, average class size and number of computers. I also checked text scores, both NJ Ask scores at the elementary schools and HSPA tests at the High Schools.

Although at the time there were little surprises about what SA scored well on but overall Monroe's data looked the best. I am not one to think that the scores and data are the end all and I think parents have a HUGE impact on how well their children do in school but I was looking for a solid district where college preparation is the norm and test scores looked ok and I didn't see any red flags. Now my sons are in 10th and 6th grades and overall, I'm happy with their education. They're both above average students, not top of the top, nor special ed. If they had been different, especially if either of them were special ed, I'd be looking for different things, like the availability of particular resources, some of which can't be determined through the school report cards. But the school report cards give you a starting point for evaluation and if you read enough of them and into them patterns emerge and things start to pop out for you. I hope you found this interesting. (Your examination of the report cards.) I really enjoy reading the comparisons, I'm sure you will too.