Passaic High School will be demolished, rebuilt. Students will be split up. See full plan

PASSAIC — The city's 67-year-old high school will welcome students for one last year before it is demolished next July.

The plan is to build a new 490,000-square-foot high school on the same Paulison Avenue property for $328 million with funds from the state's Schools Development Authority. The project will take at least three years.

The big issue, which has been only partly resolved at this point, is what to do with the 2,400 students during the demolition and rebuilding of the school.

Schools Superintendent Sandra Montañez-Diodonet, Assistant Superintendent Jeffrey Truppo and high school Principal Jose Blankley-Celis sat down with NorthJersey.com and The Record last week to discuss the transition plan after months of requests for information.

The reason for the delay in answers, Montañez-Diodonet said, was that the plan remains a work in progress.

To say that finding a transitional home for the students has been a challenge would be an understatement, she said.

The district did not want to split up the students into multiple buildings, she said, but it became unavoidable. The challenge then, was to find a way to keep students in the city and in a relatively compact area, the superintendent said.

"We didn't want them running all around the city," she said.

Truppo said the majority of students will attend either School 8 on Fourth Street or School 9 on First Street, both on the city's east side. Both schools are vacant and are being retrofitted to prepare to welcome high school students in fall 2025.

School 8 was previously the home of the city's preschool, and School 9 housed students from kindergarten through sixth grade. All students from those schools have been relocated to the new Dayton Avenue school complex.

Built in 1939 as Pope Pius XII High School, School 9 is in the midst of a $4.3 million HVAC upgrade funded by American Rescue Plan Act and other federal funds. The school has a modest cafeteria and gym, with lots of lockers. Administrators said they are confident it will meet the needs of the students.

The district, however, will also need at least one or two additional buildings. Truppo did not want to disclose the locations because officials are still negotiating with the property owners.

The transition from one central high school to several schools will involve more than just physically moving students and the furniture, officials said.

"We have to make sure students get the best education they can." Montañez-Diodonet said. "We can't use this as an excuse."

New, modern high school coming to Passaic

Rather than trying to make the old high school schedule and model work in multiple buildings, the district is embracing the transition as an opportunity to make sweeping changes in how it delivers its secondary education.

The high school's nine-period school day dates to the late 1800s and early 1900s, when the city itself was a world leader in textiles and other manufacturing factories. The high school education at that time was geared to prepare its students for that workforce.

"We are trying to get rid of the factory model," Blankley-Celis said.

Rather than try to keep to the current block scheduling, Blankley-Celis said, the timing seemed ripe to leapfrog its high school program into small learning communities, sometimes called schools within schools.

School officials said they are modeling the new learning system after small community programs like those undertaken by cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Rather than one large school, schools or blocks of students are broken into smaller learning units, Blankley-Celis said.

Schools within schools can range between 300 and 1,000 students, depending on the number of vocational concentrations incorporated within the buildings. It remains a work in progress he said.

Blankley-Celis said his staff is not waiting for next year to begin the students' transition. For students, the multifaceted plan begins Thursday, the first day of the 2024-25 school year.

The hope is that with the creation of smaller educational groups, student performance will be enhanced. The efficacy of the new learning model is not fully known, as studies show test scores did not dramatically increase, but student dropout rates declined, studies show.

The high school principal said the district is looking to create anywhere from six to a dozen groupings of students. That has not yet been fully worked out, he said. One of the challenges when trying to organize the students is keeping groups, such as ROTC students, together.

Researchers did find more positives in the new smaller groupings, including more personalized relationships for students and collegiality among teachers.

In one sense, the city started with small learning communities in 2018 when it created its academy high schools — the Academy for Science and Engineering and the Preparatory Academy.

These schools are among U.S. News & World Report's top-rated high schools in the county and are rated Nos. 28 and 93 in the state.

Blankley-Celis and Truppo said if the small learning communities work, the approach can be incorporated into the plans for the new high school building once it's completed.

Passaic's new high school will be the city's fourth

Once built, the new high school will be the city's fourth. The first Passaic High School was built between 1886 and 1887 on the corner of Lafayette Avenue and Bloomfield Avenue (now Broadway).

The second Passaic High School was built in 1910 across the street from the original building. The current Passaic High School is on Paulison Avenue and was completed in May 1957.

Unknowns of Passaic High School's Class of 2029

Keenly aware that this year's eighth graders, the future class of 2029, or at least their parents, are pondering what the situation will be like next September, the administration will get the information to students' families next week in the form of a flyer containing frequently asked questions.

Montañez-Diodonet said a more in-depth presentation on what will happen, and when, will come in January, after the district gets more detailed plans and timelines from the state's Schools Development Authority, which will be funding and building the school.

SDA officials said they currently anticipate issuing a procurement for building demolition and site preparation activities in the first or second quarter of 2025.

Board of Education President Judith Sanchez said the board remains "committed to collaborating with the administration and the school community to ensure a seamless transition."

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Passaic High School NJ will be demolished, students split up