Eagle Rock

The absenteeism data published by NBOE barely scratches the surface of the situation. The high school kids get marked present for the day but don't go to their classes. With the excessive understaffing, including security guards, even with cameras there is no way to enforce going to class. Many children cut loads of their classes every day and still get marked "present" for the entire day based on the official attendance data that NBOE uses for their state and public reporting. NBOE has access to class by class attendance data and they don't make it accessible to teachers and don't publish it on purpose. I manually calculate 60-65% attendance daily in my classes and I call home constantly to inform parents. Even when parents know kids are not in their classes, what can they do? Plus, many teachers at the high school level have up to 220 total kids that they see every single day this year. This is especially true in hard to staff subjects like bilingual Ed. Teachers are teaching 7 periods per day, each period far exceeding the legal max number of students allowed in a class per state law. That means these teachers barely have 30 seconds per student for grading each week... and the NTU "president" wants them to call home for the 60+ chronically absent students on their rosters? The NTU should focus on getting more pay for dual certified staff to stem the staff shortages, not giving PSAs saying to call home more when that doesn't help.

I recommend Portucale the restaurant on Elm Street and Suissa bakery and Cafe on Pacific.

I had a cat one that was too affectionate. I also worked from home at the time and she never stopped trying to cuddle with me, sleep on my arms, climb on me. I eventually figured out how to let her sleep comfortably on my lap while I worked on my laptop and even installed a program that would detect if she walked across the keyboard and stop the computer from sending erroneous messages of cat footprints. The toughest part was that she wanted to sleep on my face at night and lick my head and eyebrows so I had to close the door with her outside the bedroom and listen to her meow at night. But man, I miss her and I would never have given her up.

There are a few reasons to avoid knocking down historic buildings. I'd say even more important than character and history are things like land use. Many historic buildings were erected before shitty zoning policies and before ridiculous corporate-handouts like mandatory minimum parking requirements. Knocking down buildings in many cities means you'll never recover the density of the old buildings due to new set backs, etc. In those cases, it is unwise. Replacing an old row of pedestrian-friendly store fronts with one drive-through restaurant and tons of asphalt around it ruins a neighborhood.

But if the city of allows high density building, it's often a better choice to knock down and rebuild. If the city allows mixed use buildings, even better. Take the new dorm at NJIT "the View", as an example. It replaced a gorgeous, historic castle-like old school... sad, but the old school had been abandoned for the last 12 years because the maintenance costs were prohibitively expensive and the rooms were too small anyway. It was full of fire hazards. The new dorm uses the entire lot, has parking under. It's an example of great land use. My only complaint is that I thought they'd include a few store fronts that were accessible to the public at the street level. That would have been killer. But, overall the new building is a big improvement over an impractical yet charming old castle.

Were they illegally overcharging you before? (It's probably not Christmas cheer)

Love the word "may" here

The honest answer is no, not really. J&J is not accessible by transit, so you'll have to be driving, which sucks. I'd say Newark or Jersey City are the only truly urban centers in NJ. Both have easy access to NYC which is great, but I personally would not want to deal with the traffic from either of them to Raritan even 3x per week. If you enjoy living in SF... be prepared for disappointment. The people on here saying Morristown are not credible. It's not urban.

Suburban hell: isolated from society in McMansions. Lots of depression. Total car dependency. Economic segregation.

It has great urban density and the potential to be a walkable city! Also some of the best access to public transit in the United States. Probably the best for a city of around 300k people.

Old buildings are a catch 22. They're beautiful but often need excessive maintenance, especially if neglected for a period of time like many buildings in Newark. Empty, deteriorating buildings are a real hazard. But a parking lot?! I hope that's not true. That's the last thing downtown needs. In fact, they desperately need infill mixed use development in place of all the existing parking lots downtown. Newark should be made a walkable city.

Thanks for this apt summary of the situation.

I was a teacher in NJ and have multiple high school subject area certs plus a bilingual endorsement. I love teaching and have even been awarded "teacher of the year". I quit last June and I'm so glad I did. The question I faced year after year was: Should I sacrifice all my free time and work 80 hours per week for no additional pay to protect children in poverty from being burdened by the failures of our society or should I ignore and numb myself what's happening to kids and do the minimum to get my pay check and have a life or should I leave and devote myself to tackling some other important problem that has any actual chance of succeeding? I picked option 3 and left the field. I'm still in public service but now in local government supporting small time entrepreneurs where I have more resources and support to effect positive change. I ended up making more positive impact for less headache outside the absolute mire of education.

Beautiful for a long walk or planting a harvest but not for day to day life for non farmers.