Disturbances at the Hoboken Shelter

 This was posted on social media on July 29th 2025.... very concerning 

Happy St. Ann's Day-- 2025

Each saint has their own day on the Catholic calendar. For example, St. Patrick’s Day is March 17. St. Ann’s Day—honoring the mother of the Virgin Mary—is July 26. These “feast days” are celebration days, kind of like birthdays, especially in older Catholic communities.

Many traditional Italian-American parishes celebrate the feast day of their patron saint. In Hoboken, that’s St. Ann’s. Of course, there are other St. Ann’s churches around the country—and even a major cathedral in Canada—but here in Hoboken, the feast is a big deal.

Following Italian custom, on the feast day, the statue of St. Ann is brought out of the church and carried through the streets of the parish—sometimes across the whole city. Years ago, it was believed that women who were pregnant or hoping to become pregnant would carry St. Ann barefoot. Over time, shoes replaced bare feet, and these days, the statue is rolled rather than carried on shoulders.

There was also a tradition where the men of the parish would carry the statue down and up the church steps, but only the women were allowed to carry her through the streets.

The feast usually lasts about a week, leading up to July 26. Each night there’s a novena in the church, and outside, it’s like a block party: food, music, raffles, games, and people greeting friends they haven’t seen in years. The celebration brings the parish and the larger Hoboken community together—and it helps raise money to support the church.

For many, the feast feels like a homecoming. It’s a chance to return to the church where they were baptized, received First Communion, were confirmed, got married—or saw family and friends do the same. It centers people. It connects past and present.

Growing up, St. Ann’s Day was treated like a local holiday. My parents, aunts, uncles—and a lot of folks in the neighborhood—didn’t go to work. They took the day off. It was religious, yes, but also very much about community. And it still is.

A Potential Low Cost Site for a Hoboken Public School

 

The red box is owned by the Hoboken Board of Education, the yellow box is adjacent property currently under utilized (but not owned by the HBOE). This is enough ground space to build a school to house hundreds of students at minimal cost.

Most of the city blocks in Hoboken, New Jersey are 200 feet wide and 420 feet long. 

Rough Estimates: 

Estimating the number of classrooms in a 125 x 125 foot, 4-story school requires some assumptions about factors like average classroom size, allocation for non-classroom spaces, and building design.

Here's one estimate of the number of classrooms:

• Calculate total building area: Each floor's area is 125 ft x 125 ft = 15,625 square feet. A 4-story building would have 15,625 sq ft/floor * 4 floors = 62,500 square feet.
• Estimate classroom space allocation: Not all of the building's area is for classrooms. Hallways, stairwells, offices, restrooms, and specialized classrooms or facilities take up space. If 75% of the total square footage is for instruction, the usable classroom space would be 62,500 sq ft x 0.75 = 46,875 square feet.
• Therefore, a 4-story school on a 125 x 125 foot footprint could have dozens of classrooms, assuming 75% of the space is usable classroom space. 

This is an estimate, and the actual number can vary based on the school's design and requirements as well as acquiring additional land for the school's footprint. 

Potential student seating capacity using NJDOE minimal area requirements: 

Preschool - Grade 5: 376 students 

Grades 6-9: 351 students 

Grades 9-12: 311 students 

Further Analysis of the 2000 and 2001 Hoboken District Audit Around Seating Capacity (J-18)

Thanks for the feedback I've received for pointing out the importance of New Jersey’s Educational Facilities Construction and Financing Act (EFCFA), enacted in July 2000. This law introduced new minimum square footage requirements per student, which understandably would impact how seating capacity is calculated (see Chart 1). However, I want to continue to highlight a significant and puzzling shift in the Hoboken School District's reported seating capacity between 2000 and 2001—a change that deserves closer scrutiny (see Table 1). 

Those new requirements alone do not account for the full extent of the district’s reported reduction. In the 2000 official audit, the Hoboken School District reported a total seating capacity of 5,214. Applying the new square footage standards from the 2000 law, the expected adjusted capacity should have been around 4,197 seats.

Yet, the 2001 audit shows a much steeper drop: the district reported a capacity of just 3,278 seats—919 fewer than even the revised standard would suggest (again, see Chart 1).

This drastic reduction came at a time when two newly established charter schools were seeking space to operate within district facilities. While the timing may be coincidental, the data raises important questions about how and why these capacity figures changed so dramatically, and what impact those changes may have had on decisions around access and space for public and charter schools alike.

Chart 1: Seating Capacity 2000-2001 Worksheet

Table 1: 2010 Hoboken District Audit (J-18) 

Project Report SUBMITTED for Award Number 2115393

 Seeing the World through a Mathematical Lens: A Place-Based Mobile App for Creating Math Walks

Award Number: 2115393 

PI/co-PI(s): Anthony Petrosino, Cathy Ringstaff, Candace Walkington, Koshi Dhingra, Elizabeth Stringer 
Report Type: Annual Project Report; Continuing Grant 
Report Period: 08/01/2024 to 07/31/2025 
Submitted By: Candace Walkington, cwalkington@smu.edu
Program Officer Name: Leilah Lyons
Program Officer E-mail: llyons@nsf.gov
Program Officer Phone Number: (703) 292-0000

Your project report has been successfully submitted to NSF.

Information about the grant: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2115393&HistoricalAwards=false

ABSTRACT

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

Math is everywhere in the world, but youth may see math as disconnected from their everyday experiences and wonder how math is relevant to their lives. There is evidence that informal math done by children is highly effective, involving efficiency, flexibility, and socializing. Yet, more is needed to understand how educators can support math engagement outside of school, and the role these out-of-school experiences can play relative to the classroom and lifelong STEM learning. This Innovations and Development Project seeks to conduct research on a location-based mobile app for informal mathematics learning. This research takes place at 9 informal learning sites and involves iteratively designing an app in which learners can view and contribute to an interactive map of math walk ?stops? at these sites. Learners will be able to select locations and watch short videos or view pictures with text that describe how mathematical principles are present in their surroundings. For example, learners could use the app to discover how a painting by a local Latino artist uses ratio and scale, or how a ramp in downtown was designed with a specific slope to accommodate wheelchairs. Research studies will examine the affordances of augmented reality (AR) overlays where learners can hold up the camera of their mobile device, and see mathematical representations (e.g., lines, squares) layered over real-world objects in their camera feed. Research studies will also examine the impact of having learners create their own math walk stops at local informal learning sites, uploading pictures, descriptions, and linking audio they narrate, where they make observations about how math appears in their surroundings and pose interesting questions about STEM ideas and connections they wonder about. 

This project draws on research on informal math learning, problem-posing, and culturally-sustaining pedagogies to conduct cycles of participatory design-based research on technology-supported math walks. The research questions are: How does posing mathematical scenarios in community-imbedded math walks impact learners? attitudes about mathematics? How can experiencing AR overlays on real world objects highlight mathematical principles and allow learners to see math in the world around them? How can learners and informal educators be engaged as disseminators of content they create and as reviewers of mathematical content created by others? To answer these questions, five studies will be conducted where learners create math walk stops: without technology (Study 1), with a prototype version of the app (Study 2), and with or without AR overlays (Study 3). Studies will also compare children's experiences receiving math walk stops vs. creating their own stops (Study 4) and explore learners reviewing math walk stops made by their peers (Study 5). Using a community ethnography approach with qualitative and quantitative process data of how youth engage with the app and with each other, the project will determine how the development of math interest can be facilitated, how learner-driven problem generation can be scaffolded, and under what circumstances app-based math walks are most effective. The results will contribute to research on the development of interest, problem-posing, informal mathematics learning, and digital supports for STEM learning such as AR. This project will promote innovation and have strategic impact through a digital infrastructure that could be scaled up to support STEM walks anywhere in the world, while also building a local STEM learning ecosystem among informal learning sites focused on informal mathematics. This project is a partnership between Southern Methodist University, a nonprofit, talkSTEM that facilitates the creation of community math walks, and 9 informal learning providers. The project will directly serve approximately 500 grades 4-8 learners and 30-60 informal educators. The project will build capacity at 9 informal learning sites, which serve hundreds of thousands of students per year in their programming.

This Innovations in Development project is supported by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to (a) advance new approaches to and evidence-based understanding of the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments; (b) provide multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences; (c) advance innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments; and (d) engage the public of all ages in learning STEM in informal environments.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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Milton, Saki and Sager, Marc and Walkington, Candace "Exploring STEM Identity and Belonging in Minoritized Girls at a Summer Camp" , 2024 Citation Details

Milton, Saki and Sager, Marc T and Walkington, Candace "Incorporating Critical Data Literacy into a STEM Summer Camp" , 2025 https://doi.org/10.22318/icls2025.446301 Citation Details

Milton, Saki and Sager, Marc T and Walkington, Candace "Understanding Racially Minoritized Girls Perceptions of Their STEM Identities, Abilities, and Sense of Belonging in a Summer Camp" Education Sciences , v.13 , 2023https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13121183 Citation Details

Milton, S. and Sager, M.T. and Walkington, C. and Petrosino, A.J. and Sherard, M.K. and Dhingra, K. "Students Attitudes towards Mathematics during Math Walks" Prcoeedings of the 2023 Annual Meeting of the International Society of the Learning Sciences , 2023 Citation Details

Sager, Marc_T and Milton, Saki and Walkington, Candace "Girls leading the conversation: harnessing the potential of podcasting for informal and project-based learning" Discover Education , v.4 , 2025 https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-025-00406-9 Citation Details

Sager, Marc T and Sherard, Maximilian K and Milton, Saki and Walkington, Candace and Petrosino, Anthony J "Rising in the ranks!: learning math or playing games?" Frontiers in Education , v.8 , 2023 https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2023.1302693Citation Details

Sager, Marc T and Sherard, Maximilian K and Walkington, Candace and Milton, Saki and Petrosino, Anthony J "Seeing mathematics together: A comparative case study of youths and facilitators collaborating to learn mathematics in informal settings" The Journal of Mathematical Behavior , v.75 , 2024 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmathb.2024.101171 Citation Details

Sager, M.T. and Sherard, M.K. and Walkington, C. and Petrosino, A.J. and Milton, S. "Examining Mathematical Questioning during Math Walks" Proceedings of the 2023 Annual Meeting of the International Society of the Learning Sciences , 2023Citation Details

Walkington, C. "Student-created math walks in informal learning spaces" .) Proceedings of the 16th International Conference of the Learning Sciences ICLS 2022 , 2022 Citation Details

Wang, Min and Walkington, Candace "Investigating problem-posing during math walks in informal learning spaces"Frontiers in Psychology , v.14 , 2023 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1106676 Citation Details

From Classroom to Community: Evaluating Data Science Practices in Education and Social Justice Projects (2025)

A new peer-reviewed publication by colleagues Marc Sager, Jeanna Wieselmann and myself titled "From Classroom to Community: Evaluating Data Science Practices in Education and Social Justice Projects" published in the journal EDUCATION SCIENCE. 

 Our newly published paper in Education Sciences explores how students develop “critical data literacy” — the ability to work with data not just technically, but ethically and thoughtfully — through a summer-long data science program. 

 The study compared what students learned in a traditional classroom setting with how they applied those skills in a real-world project focused on food justice. In class, students were introduced to basic data tools and abstract concepts. But it was in the hands-on project work where they really began to connect data science with broader social issues. By analyzing real data and thinking through the ethical implications of their work, students gained a deeper and more practical understanding of data science.  

This work suggests that to truly teach data literacy, educators need to go beyond lectures and worksheets. Real-world projects—especially those grounded in issues students care about—can help bridge the gap between theory and practice, preparing students to tackle meaningful problems with data.  

Citation: Sager, M. T., Wieselmann, J. R., & Petrosino, A. J. (2025). From Classroom to Community: Evaluating Data Science Practices in Education and Social Justice Projects. Education Sciences,15(7),878. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/educsci15070878

From Classroom to Community: Evaluating Data Science Practices in Education and Social Justice Projects by Tony Petrosino on Scribd

The Year the Hoboken District Lost Capacity for Over 1900 Students

 Look at the chart below and notice the incredible drop in capacity that occurred in the district buildings just as Elysian and Hoboken Charter were coming online and were requesting space. It is all here in black and white...

Click to Enlarge