OBHS Class of 2026, Matawan | Fees, Rankings, Address, Admission, Vacancies, Reviews & More

A parent’s perspective:
This is industrial scale education. Its obsessive focus in recent decades has been teaching to the test. Statewide exams go a long way in many parent’s eyes as a measure of school performance, and this school, from Board and administration, to a harassed faculty has been virtually recreated as a test taking machine.

Old Bridge is not a poor community, yet its middle schools and single high school function as if the economies of scale, which keep the tax rates low, can be viewed as a success as long as the system can creep upward a few points every year on statewide proficiency exams.

What does this scaling up of school size mean: Nearly 3000 students compete for resources in athletics, the arts, music, drama, literature and history, that from this parent’s perspective would be insufficient for a school a third the size of Old Bridge High. So far as the administration and Board is concerned, they are adiaphora, trivialities even.

Yet art, music, history and literature are the very foundations of our culture: Without these things, what shapes us in our opinions and ideas? How do we judge the value of political ideas and the competing claims for our loyalties, time and energy? What happened to the idea that schools are the classrooms of democracy? Nowadays, it seems as if all they can speak of is job readiness.

Old Bridge combined two large high school into the current education factory just as the fever for standardised testing was gaining full momentum in NJ. We watched the middle school curriculum being modified to chase test scores.

Our son attends a great university, but we both feel that he has entered college without the same level of preparation that was offered, or indeed expected of us. Every generation in American history has expected the next to do a little better, prosper a bit more, and in this regard Old Bridge is letting its children down.

If we truly want to do well for our children, and our nation, the school board would look to the possibility of dividing up the middle schools and high school into smaller, more humanely sized institutions, and insist the administrators stop cheating. What do I mean by cheating? Teaching to the test is a form of cheating, and it shortchanges our children. The best school districts in this state achieve great scores on required tests not by rote drills and hammering children with the same materials and exercises over and over, but instead by letting teachers do that which they love most: teach.

Our best schools offer diverse curriculums with plenty of seats and broad requirements in classes like history and literature that require analytical and synthesizing skills. They have high expectations across the board, instead of a fundamental distrust of children’s desire to learn. In high schools they offer enough seats in electives, and more generous availability of guidance counsellors. They are small enough that principals and other key administrators can actually know more than a tiny percentage of the children in their charge.

Old Bridge has many parents who have moved here from New York. Indeed former New yorkers, Brooklynites and Staten Islanders have given Old Bridge much of its prosperity, character and vitality. They attended very large public or parochial schools, both of which were acknowledged to be deeply flawed, and badly underfunded. I would suggest to these parents that they set their expectations much higher. We can afford to do much better by our children than we have.

I Went to this High School to Attend their Summer Camp Program as a Camper 10 Years Ago in 2008 and I LOVED It! Awesome School! GO KNIGHTS! GO PURPLE! Always Do The Right Thing!??????????

It’s sad how one of the teachers here named Lisa Glide has sex with one of the students. Very disappointing