Middletown Has Discussed Closing Schools/Redistricting Before

MIDDLETOWN, NJ — Multiple Middletown school superintendents before Jessica Alfone suggested re-districting in Middletown schools.

The Middletown school district has publicly discussed redistricting (the term for closing/consolidating schools) for at least the past eight years. Alfone is not the first superintendent to propose this idea.

In fact, she is the third.

In 2017, then-superintendent Dr. Bill George proposed redistricting. But the school board at the time unanimously rejected the idea, with every single board member voting against it.

Then, in 2020, redistricting was again brought up under superintendent Mary Ellen Walker, and the district paid $48,000 to Milone & MacBroom planning firm to study enrollment trends in the district. The firm showed that district-wide K-12 enrollment was trending down. Middletown's student enrollment is currently approximately 8,400 students, spread out over 11 elementaries, three middle schools and two high schools.

Alfone wants to reduce that to eight elementaries, two middle schools and two high schools.

In 2020, then-Board of Education President Pam Rogers told Patch in this article "everything is on the table," which included possibly closing down more schools. Like current Board president Frank Capone, she cited state aid reductions as the number-one reason why it was necessary to close some Middletown schools.

"We have an overcrowding issue in the district, such as at Thompson and High School South, whereas other schools have room for 100 students. None of these decisions are easy since we lost that state funding," Rogers said in 2020.

Deb Wright is one of the members who's been on the Middletown school board the longest. She supports the school closures, and her son goes to one of the schools that will be closed (Bayshore Middle School). She said Tuesday night:

"It was never a question of if we would hit the fiscal cliff. It was a question of when."

Middletown residents say this latest school closure plan was hidden from them, and then sprung on them.

It's Not Just 3 Schools: Middletown Seeks To Close More In Future (Thursday)