Families rally outside Board of Ed meeting to protest potential sale of New Brunswick school

Dozens of families rallied outside the New Brunswick Board of Education meeting Tuesday night where project developers announced their proposed plan to build a new state-of-the-art school for 750 students.

News 12 Staff

Feb 26, 2020, 3:23 AM

Updated 1,689 days ago

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Dozens of families rallied outside the New Brunswick Board of Education meeting Tuesday night where project developers announced their proposed plan to build a new state-of-the-art school for 750 students.
The families are urging school officials not to sell the Lincoln Annex School, which currently houses the 750 fourth through eighth graders.
“It’s our education. We came here and it’s going to affect the future. What will happen in the future?” asks sixth grader Wendoly Silva-Gonzalez.
School officials want to sell the school to make way for an extension of the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey that is located across the street. It has been suggested that the students be temporarily placed in a former warehouse during the construction of the cancer institute while their new school is being built.
"They shouldn't be saying that we're against cancer, because we're not. It shouldn't be built on the education of my children and the children that attend that school,” says mother Maria Juarez.
The proposed $800 million deal between Rutgers and RWJBarnabas Health would both construct the extension of the Rutgers cancer institute on the Lincoln Annex School property and build a new school a few miles away on what is considered a brownfield site – a site where the soil is possibly contaminated with hazardous materials.
"So, what we need to do now is go back to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and take all the steps necessary to clean the site up to a residential standard, says Christopher Paladino, president of the New Brunswick Develop Corporation.
The project's developers say they plan on building up the cancer facility in three years and the new school in two and a half years.