Register

Edison Township Public Schools

312 Pierson Avenue | Edison | New Jersey 08837 | Phone: (732) 452-4900
Calendar Parent Portal Staff Directory

Board of Education

  • May 10, 2013

    Construction of the two-story addition to Edison High School is moving along nicely and it is worth reviewing at this point what this science wing will mean to the school and to the entire district. Instruction in science will be able to advance into the 21st century with these new facilities at one of the school system’s oldest buildings.

    Comments (-1)

  • May 6, 2013

    Once again, we were reminded of the excellence of the music programs in the Edison Public Schools. The district’s two high schools were among 12 from the state chosen to perform at the New Jersey State Band Gala 2013 yesterday at Rutgers University. This was an occasion for the wind ensembles from Edison High School and J.P. Stevens to shine. This annual competition is the culmination of competitive preliminaries.

    Comments (-1)

  • April 29, 2013

    Two of Edison High School’s finest, Steven Langballe and Matthew Jansen, attained the esteemed rank of Eagle Scout yesterday in a ceremony held by Troop 12, one of the oldest troops in New Jersey and in all of scouting. The troop was formed in 1917.

    Comments (-1)

  • April 15, 2013

    If your polling place is in a school building, you will see something new when you go to vote tomorrow. The BoE arranged some time ago to have an armed Edison police officer on duty at each site. The officers, paid by the Board, will be present in school buildings when the polls open at noon and remain on the premises until after school is dismissed. Voting will take place between noon and 9 p.m.

    Comments (-1)

  • April 2, 2013

    Registered voters in Edison will have the opportunity to vote for three candidates for the BoE and to cast a ballot for or against the annual school budget on April 16. Polls will be open from noon until 9 p.m.

    Comments (-1)

  • March 6, 2013

    March 6, 2013You have probably heard about the STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering, and math. Most likely, you think of these subjects in connection with students in secondary school and college. But the foundation for studying the STEM subjects is laid in the primary grades and youngsters who get an early grounding in these areas will have an advantage in the later grades.

    Comments (-1)

  • February 4, 2013

    The school system will take a major step when it opens a Science and Engineering Academy in the fall to serve students who want to pursue a rigorous college-preparatory program. The Academy, to be housed at Edison High School, will accept on a selective basis 24 entering ninth-grade students from throughout the school district.

    Comments (-1)

  • January 18, 2013

    The new gifted and talented (G&T) program is off and running strong. A total of 542 students, 15 percent of all the district students in third grade through fifth grade, qualified for the program. They leave their regular classes for two hours of instruction each week.

    Comments (-1)

  • January 7, 2013

    The tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, caused school officials throughout the country to think about conditions in their own districts. With that in mind, I am appointing an Ad Hoc Committee on School Safety and Security.

    Comments (-1)

  • December 20, 2012

    Anyone who knows much about the Edison district is aware of the overcrowding in our schools. Population soared in Edison, especially during certain periods.

    Comments (-1)

  • November 26, 2012

    Edison’s elementary schools had a mixed record of achievement on the New Jersey Assessment of Skills and Knowledge (NJASK) administered in 2011. In fact, elementary schools across the state, along with those in Edison—for reasons that have yet to be explained--did not score particularly well on these examinations.

    Comments (-1)

  • October 15, 2012

    The state assessment results for the 2011-12 school year have some good news and some bad news for the Edison Public Schools. Today, we will discuss the results only for middle schools and high schools.

    Comments (-1)

  • September 25, 2012

    Homeroom isn’t the same at Edison High School this school year. In fact, home room is no longer home room. There is no home room.

    Comments (-1)

  • September 12, 2012

    September 12, 2012 There is a great deal of discussion about an academic achievement gap that exists among ethnic groups in American schools, but another sort of gap gets far less attention. Female students in high school trail male students in achievement on many SAT subject-area tests. It is true both nationally and in Edison’s two high schools.

    Comments (-1)

  • August 27, 2012

    Response to Intervention (RTI), an instructional approach that is growing in use around the country, represents a chance to individualize instruction for pupils who are lagging in their achievement. In some cases it identifies those who may be candidates for special education and can in some instances avert the need for special services by allowing children to catch up with their classmates.

    Comments (-1)

  • August 20, 2012

    A full-blown Spanish program will be restored to Edison’s elementary schools next month. The program was severely reduced for the 2010-11 school year as a result of fiscal pressures and remained that way in 2011-12. It will serve children from grades one through five with each student having a 40-minute session taught by a Spanish-speaking teacher once a week for 40 minutes.

    Comments (-1)

  • August 9, 2012

    Summer is a time when the school system gets ready for the coming academic year. For Edison, this will mean the installation of more than 800 computers in schools throughout the district. Some computers replace ones that have grown obsolete and others supplement what already existed in certain buildings.

    Comments (-1)

  • July 18, 2012

    During the school year just ended the district ran a pilot program to let certain elementary schools gain experience in teaching Singapore Math. This is an approach that focuses on problem solving. Instead of the usual wide curriculum that tries to cover many math topics and often does so insufficiently, Singapore Math delves into fewer topics and covers them more thoroughly. The emphasis is on deep understanding.

    Comments (-1)

  • June 15, 2012

    June 15, 2012 - Edison will finally have an exemplary gifted and talented (G&T) program in its elementary schools. Plans are moving forward for the program to begin in September.

    Comments (-1)

  • May 22, 2012

    The Edison Public Schools have been on a financially unsustainable course and so the emphasis in the contract just approved by the BoE and the Edison Township Education Association (ETEA) was on sustainability.

    Comments (-1)

  • May 5, 2012

    Actions this week by the state have focused attention on attainments by high school students throughout New Jersey. First came the announcement that high school students will eventually need to pass as many as 12 end-of-the-year tests to earn their diplomas. Then, the State Department of Education released statistics that recomputed graduation rates, showing that in most cases New Jersey’s high schools—including both of them in Edison--have lower rates than the schools reported.

    Comments (-1)

  • April 26, 2012

    My colleagues on the school board honored me last night by voting to give me another term as president. I will strive to fulfill their confidence in me. This board has made great strides in the past two years and I’m confident that it will continue to serve the students of the Edison Public Schools in exemplary fashion. Our work is cut out for us despite the progress that the board and the school system have already made.

    Comments (-1)

  • April 5, 2012

    Early last month, a group of board members and administrators met at Herbert Hoover Middle School and before the meeting they heard from students at the school on a variety of issues. I shared some of the student opinions in my message.

    Comments (-1)

  • March 26, 2012

    Many middle school students who struggle academically could achieve at higher levels if they had more support in honing their basic skills and developing their test-taking strategies in reading, writing, and mathematics.

    Comments (-1)

  • March 12, 2012

    So, what do middle-schoolers have on their minds? A group of school board members and administrators met last week with some sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders at Herbert Hoover Middle School to find out what they think about a number of issues affecting their school lives.

    Comments (-1)

  • March 5, 2012

    The preliminary school budget for 2012-13, on which the Board of Education will hold a public hearing on March 26, continues to restore features of the program that were reduced or eliminated during the difficult financial period in 2010 and to build upon the excellence of Edison’s existing academic program.

    Comments (-1)

  • February 22, 2012

    What an honor it was! Rutgers University selected six outstanding high school bands to perform at its 2012 Mid-Atlantic Wind Band Festival, an event that recognized the premier groups from throughout the region on February 16 and 17at the university’s Nicholas Performing Arts Center. And, believe it or not, two of the six bands were from Edison, from our two high schools--Edison High and J.P. Stevens.

    Comments (-1)

  • February 13, 2012

    Exactly one year ago this month, Richard J. O’Malley assumed his duties as superintendent of the Edison Public Schools. And what a year it has been. The school system is in ascendancy and many of his initiatives are already bearing fruit or will soon be in place.

    Comments (-1)

  • February 1, 2012

    It is interesting how many teachers seemed to decide on their career at an early age, frequently driven by a passion for teaching even though they had not yet reached college. Some others, though, took a more circuitous route to the classroom, not realizing until much later that they wanted to teach. Teachers in Edison discussed these various motivations in the biographies that they provided in connection with the competition for the district’s Teacher of the Year.

    Comments (-1)

  • January 19, 2012

    January 19, 2012 - Of the platinum metals, it is the one most rapidly attacked by air and will readily be reduced to a powder. Density is no defense to oxygen for what densest of all elements?

    Comments (-1)

  • December 26, 2011

    Consider these statistics: Students coming out of high schools in the United States and pursuing undergraduate college degrees in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) take longer to complete those degrees and are more apt to switch majors than students seeking degrees in many non-STEM fields. In other words, according to the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute, majoring in a STEM field is a struggle for all too many American undergraduates who are not adequately prepared.

    Comments (-1)

  • December 15, 2011

    AVID is coming to Edison High School (EHS). So, what is AVID? It is a very successful, non-profit college preparedness program that serves the students in the middle, the ones who are most likely to get the least attention as other resources are focused on the highest achievers and the lowest achievers. AVID (stands for Advancement Via Individual Determination) will begin at EHS next September, with most of the rest of this school year devoted to planning.

    Comments (-1)

  • November 22, 2011

    A charter school that proposes to draw students from Edison and New Brunswick has filed its fourth application for recognition with the New Jersey State Department of Education. Authorization of this school, Tikun Olam Hebrew Language Charter High School, would not be in the best interests of Edison’s taxpayers nor its public school students. It is up to residents of Edison to register their opinions on this proposal.

    Comments (-1)

  • November 16, 2011

    As some of you already know, the state has a new Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights, enacted by the Legislature and now in effect. The new regulations take a stronger position against harassment, intimidation, and bullying involving schoolchildren (HIB). While there were already regulations affecting bullying, it took a series of incidents to trigger them. Now, a single incident will bring the regulations into play. Furthermore, the new regulations pertain to certain incidents off school grounds, as well as those at school—whenever a school representative is made aware of the alleged incident.

    Comments (-1)

  • October 21, 2011

    When Congress enacted the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law almost 10 years ago, one of its main objectives was to focus attention on subgroups of students whose achievement tends to trail the accomplishments of the majority of students.

    Comments (-1)

  • September 23, 2011

    Singapore is a tiny, densely-populated country in southeast Asia with about the same size population as Chicago and Houston combined. Singapore also ranks consistently among the highest-scoring countries in the world in the scores that its students attain on mathematics assessments.

    Comments (-1)

  • September 14, 2011

    Edison’s public schools are overcrowded. Thus, it’s a constant struggle to keep classes to a manageable size. The research is clear: students in smaller classes—especially in the lowest elementary grades—have a better chance of learning.

    Comments (-1)

  • September 2, 2011

    The downfall of some teachers is their inability to control their classrooms. It is with this fact in mind that Edison’s Summer Institute for new members of the staff, held at the end of August, contained a session on classroom management.

    Comments (-1)

  • August 25, 2011

    Our district was slow to move into the age of technology, but now it is doing so with a vengeance. Innovations that are already in place, those that will occur with the opening of school, and those scheduled for the near future hold promise of making the Edison Public Schools a leader in using technology.

    Comments (-1)

  • August 5, 2011

    One of the purposes of school systems across the country is to produce graduates who will be knowledgeable and responsible citizens. The preservation of democracy depends on this outcome.

    Comments (-1)

  • July 26, 2011

    The BoE has set four major goals for the 2011-12 school year. The goals are not only for the board itself and the superintendent, but for the system at large. Realization of the goals will benefit the district and its students.

    Comments (-1)

  • July 12, 2011

    In case you haven’t noticed, blackboards, just as Oldsmobiles and Mercurys, are passe. Now, white boards are all the rage and they can perform functions that we usually associate with computers.

    Comments (-1)

  • June 30, 2011

    There has been a rumor afoot that the school board and the superintendent have made it a policy to hire neither residents of Edison nor relatives of employees of the school system. This is untrue on both counts.

    Comments (-1)

  • June 20, 2011

    A portion of the education of Edison’s children occurs outside the usual school day. These experiences tend to complement what happens in public school in that they reinforce and extend knowledge, build study habits, and sometimes expose youngsters to topics that they would not otherwise encounter.

    Comments (-1)

  • June 13, 2011

    Contrary to popular belief, Latin is not a “dead” language. It is very much alive here in Edison and in schools elsewhere in the country. In fact, the school system wants to hire another Latin teacher to work more than a halftime schedule. Latin enrollments in Edison have been growing for the last four years.

    Comments (-1)

  • June 2, 2011

    It is traditional at many schools for students to make class trips, especially in conjunction with their graduation or promotion from the school. This has been the practice each spring for more than a decade for eighth graders at John Adams Middle School (JAMS), who are on the verge of going on to J.P. Stevens for high school.

    Comments (-1)

  • May 23, 2011

    The primary grades are, for the most part, when children learn to read. They grow familiar with the sounds of letters and blends of letters so that they can decode and pronounce words that are at first little more than squiggles to them. They begin to derive meaning from what they read. Teachers prod them to construct sentences. They create their own simple stories. Often, their teachers make “word walls” on which new words are added as students’ incipient vocabularies expand and they borrow some of those new words for their own writing.

    Comments (-1)

  • May 11, 2011

    I am honored to be re-elected president of the BoE by my colleagues. I appreciate their confidence in me and I am humbled by the awesome responsibilities of the position. As I said in a presidential address last year, we have no greater responsibility than educating other people’s children with other people’s money.

    Comments (-1)

  • May 6, 2011

    One reason that New Jersey requires schools to teach about the Holocaust is so that young people will know of the horrors that can occur when tolerance disappears. This week at Herbert Hoover Middle School, two witnesses provided students with the living truth about those events.

    Comments (-1)

  • April 29, 2011

    It was beginning to look as if summer school would become an economic casualty, never again offered by the Edison school system as it sought to save money. But then the state declared that school districts could charge students to attend summer school, a practice that was previously prohibited.

    Comments (-1)

  • April 4, 2011

    In and of itself, the 1.7% increase in school spending from local tax revenues—the smallest jump in years—would ordinarily be accompanied by only a small rise in property taxes. The superintendent has been making this point in his presentations on the 2011-12 budget.

    Comments (-1)

  • March 30, 2011

    The Edison Public Schools took another step forward with the dedication this week of a new science wing at J.P. Stevens High School.

    Comments (-1)

  • March 25, 2011

    Martin Luther King (MLK) Elementary School yesterday celebrated its designation by the federal government as a Blue Ribbon School...

    Comments (-1)

  • March 17, 2011

    Some disabled students... dwell in a world in which words, phrases, and expressions ... that convey meaning to others can be sources of confusion for them.

    Comments (-1)

  • March 8, 2011

    When the BoE set out to prepare...

    Comments (-1)

  • March 3, 2011

    This is Read Across America Week in elementary schools in Edison and elsewhere...

    Comments (-1)

  • February, 2011

    Message archive from February 2011

    Comments (-1)

  • January, 2011

    Message archive from January 2011.

    Comments (-1)

  • December, 2010

    Message archive from December 2010.

    Comments (-1)

  • November, 2010

    Message archive from November 2010.

    Comments (-1)