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| Hoboken Water Main Break- November 23-28, 2015 |
Numbers released last month by the New Jersey Department of Education (DOE) place Hoboken No. 81 on the top 100 school districts with violence (from schools with highest rates per 1,000 students).
The Commissioner’s Annual Report to the Education Committees of the Senate and General Assembly on Violence, Vandalism, and Substance Abuse in New Jersey Public Schools added up the cases between July 1, 2014 and June 30, 2015.
The mile-square city, which has a total of 1,888 students in its district according to the state, had 42 cases from 2014 to 2015 that made it to the state-sanctioned Violence and Vandalism Report: 30 cases of violence, 1 of vandalism, 1 of weapons-offenses, 4 of substance offense, and 9 of HIB (harassment, intimidation, and bullying). However, the statistics are contingent upon districts reporting the incidents properly. In past years, districts like the New York City public schools have been accused of underreporting their statistics (note: there have no reported instances on NJ schools under reporting).
Other nearby districts were reported to have more cases of violence, but due to a substantially larger student body, they didn’t make the top 100 because the rate per student was lower. For instance, Jersey City, which has an enrollment of 27, 810 students in the district, had 249 cases. And in Bayonne, which has as many as 9,611 students, 32 cases were reported**.
The list that includes Hoboken has, at the top, districts like Beverly and Cumberland.
Read more: Hudson Reporter - Brandt says bye to scaffolding after 4 years School board meeting Future projects violence stats politics
** note: Using the numbers reported by the Hoboken Reporter for this article we see Hoboken has a violence, vandalism, and bullying rate more than twice as high as Jersey City and almost six times higher than Bayonne- In fact, Hoboken has the highest rate of Violence, Vandalism, and Bullying in Hudson County, NJ).
