Asbury Park- Educational News

          As I have been researching Asbury Park I was very impressed with the High School, its infrastructure is beautiful. It is nicer than some of the other high schools I have seen in much wealthier districts. It is a large school surrounded by gardens, and has tall Roman sculptural columns, very expensive looking. Another new aspect of the school is their football field. It is all new, large, colorful, and beautiful. A few weeks ago as I searched for articles written about the educational system in the town I came across many postings discussing how Asbury Park spent a large amount of money in per pupil expenditures, about $35,000 compared to other towns who have more students and receive less money. Then I looked at their results and just as those postings had described, the test results were disappointing. So where is all of this money going ?  From what I saw it might be going into making the infrastructure look appealing and pretty, because the testing results are remaining mostly constant. Then I just read on the town's website that they are looking for a new superintendent, it is reported that they notified the current one her contract would not be renewed after this year, could it be because of  these choices ? Could she have done something to improve the educational system, and could those choices have helped increase the test scores ? I would hope so, and hope that the next superintendent makes the right choices for the students.

Asbury Park News

          During the past few weeks I have been researching the community of Asbury Park. This week I was looking through the city's website to see how the town government portrays the community. The website was impressive, I was asking myself how does this town seem so much like New York City, what caught my attention the most was that for a town with only a population of 116,000 it has twelve art galleries, a few music venues, the boardwalk, and so on. But then as you compare this to the town specs such as their income, age bracket, real estate values, reduced priced lunches, and school testing results there is another picture I saw that is not the one portrayed in their website.

        The town is basically split into two sections by the train tracks, one is the upper economic part and the other the economically challenged section. All one has to do is cross the train tracks and you can feel like you are in two different places while still being in the same town. In my opinion it seems like the town government is more concerned about catering to visitors, and the more upscale residents that may spend their summers there than on the full time residents. There are twelve galleries in the town but there are no programs when an after school snack is offered without a fee.  There seems to be a lot of money being spent on many things pretty, and nice infrastructure but not being invested into education or the full time students.