Jersey City’s Taxpayer Funded Schools: Enrollment Overview with Focus on Income Diversity

The charts below show enrollment data for Jersey City Public Schools. The Jersey City Public Schools system is the 39-school district under the purview of the Jersey City Board of Education (BOE) and is funded through taxpayer dollars. Public charter schools also receive taxpayer dollars, but they are operated and overseen independently of the JC BOE. I will be publishing separate data on the charter schools in the near future. A note: Renaissance Instititue, is a program worth mentioning that is listed as a “school” on the JC BOE website, but is technically a program. Renaissance Institute helps students who are struggling to graduate; students are given individualized paths and teaching instruction to help them graduate on time from their official high school (e.g. Ferris, Lincoln, etc).

The charts below are based on 2016/17 enrollment data because the most recently available data, 2017/18 enrollment, does not include free or reduced lunch (FRL) statistics (I’m not sure why FRL stats were removed from the latest batch of NJ DOE data).

A student qualifies for “free or reduced lunch” if his or her family earns below certain income thresholds. For this reason, these statistics are used to glean insight into income diversity in our schools. For instance, children from families with incomes at or below 130 percent of the Federal poverty level are eligible for free meals and children with incomes between 130 and 185 percent of the Federal poverty level are eligible for reduced price meals. You can read more about free and reduced lunch here.

The charts are color coded as follows:

Darker RED = HIGHER percentage of free or reduced lunch population at the school, i.e. more students from lower income families
Darker GREEN = LOWER percentage of free or reduced lunch population at the school, i.e. fewer students from lower income families

You can filter the data based on School Type (e.g. elementary vs. grammar vs. high school) or Ward (political areas represented by independent council representatives. I created a ward and state legislative map here, in case you don’t know what Ward you live in. And Jersey City council representatives can be found here.