Parents, teachers march to prevent sale of New Brunswick school

A group of parents, teachers and activists rallied in New Brunswick to protest the sale of one of the city’s schools.

News 12 Staff

Feb 18, 2020, 4:56 PM

Updated 1,755 days ago

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A group of parents, teachers and activists rallied in New Brunswick to protest the sale of one of the city’s schools.
Tuesday’s march was to save the Lincoln Annex School, a fourth through eighth grade public school that is in danger of being demolished. The school is better known as the former St. Peter’s High School.
A developer has proposed the school as the new location of RWJBarnabas Health and Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey's Cancer Pavilion, a $750 million cancer hospital with outpatient and research facilities. Lincoln Annex is located across the street from the medical center.
But parents say the school is conveniently located for their families and that they do not want to school to close down. They took their case to the Rutgers Board of Governors on Tuesday to fight for the school.
The developer has suggested a site on Jersey Avenue as a location to build a new, state-of-the-art school. This would be just under a mile from the current Lincoln Annex School location.
Devco development company president Christopher Paladino says that a $55 million school will be built at no cost to the New Brunswick Board of Education. He says that it will have better conditions than what is currently at the Lincoln Annex School.
In the meantime, it has been proposed to temporarily send the students to New Brunswick P-Tech. But parents say that they object to this idea since P-Tech is located in an industrial area.
Parents also say that they are concerned about building a new school on Jersey Avenue due to concerns about contamination on that formerly industrial site. The developer says it can and will be cleaned up to meet the proper standards.
The New Brunswick Board of Education has not made a decision on the fate of Lincoln Annex, but the developer says that the company hopes to break ground on the cancer facility by November.