It Happened In Hillsborough: Where Will We Put All the Kids

There are approximately 7,200 students in the Hillsborough Township School District. That’s about 500
fewer students than the peak enrollment more than 20 years ago. And still the common perception is
that the schools are overcrowded! On the contrary, there is room for a few more! About 7% more. What
would happen if the schools truly were at capacity and there was a 23% increase (1,650 students) in just

one year? That’s the problem the Hillsborough Board of Education was facing when schools opened 70
years ago this month, in September 1956.

Where Will We Put All the Kids?

The Hillsborough Consolidated School (now called HES) opened in September 1950. It was Hillsborough’s
first new school in 21 years, designed to be a modern replacement for the township’s remaining one-
and two-room schoolhouses. During the preceding summer, the Neshanic, Pleasant View, and Clover Hill
Schools were sold, and the Flagtown and Liberty schools were put in mothballs. Then the building boom
began.

Within a year, the Flagtown School was reopened, and the members of the Hillsborough BoE looked
nervously at housing development approvals. By 1953 they had settled on a plan: build an addition to
the Consolidated School that would double its size. The addition would front on Route 206 and include a
gymnasium, a cafeteria, and thirteen new classrooms. Price tag: $500,000.

Borrowing that much money wouldn’t be easy. With the bond for the new Consolidated School barely
paid, the district and the town as a whole were way over their borrowing limit. It took until July 1954 to
convince the state to allow the district to go to referendum. Voters overwhelmingly approved the bond
issue in September 1954 by a 416-98 margin.

An architect was hired, plans were drawn up, discarded, and submitted again. Bids went out. But
nothing really clicked. The district needed another $100,000 from the public to get the design they
needed. Meanwhile, the 54-55 and 55-56 school years were near disasters. Students at Flagtown were
on split sessions (8-12, 12:15-4:15); sixth graders at Bloomingdale were in the basement. Others were
taught in a makeshift classroom at the South Branch Grange Hall, or forced to use outhouse facilities at
Liberty School and Fairview (rented from Branchburg).

A PR campaign noting these deficiencies was successful, and the $100,000 bond referendum passed in
June 1955. When the Consolidated School opened its doors in September 1956, the district had an
enrollment of 1,052 – a 23% increase over the previous year’s 853! Despite all the construction you’ve
seen all around Hillsborough the past 20 years, we are unlikely to ever see an enrollment increase like
that again in our lifetimes.
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Gregory Gillette has been writing about local history for 20 years, starting with his Courier News column
“Gillette on Hillsborough” and continuing today with a Facebook page of the same name. A recipient of
the Somerset County Cultural and Heritage Commission History Award for Education/Leadership in
2018, he was named as Hillsborough’s first Local Historian in 2025.