•  History

     

    MANALAPAN-ENGLISHTOWN REGIONAL SCHOOLS  
      A HISTORY LESSON WITH A FUTURE 

    Manalapan Township and Englishtown Borough were originally part of Freehold Township. Manalapan, as a separate entity, was established in 1848. Although Englishtown identified itself as a separate village in the 1700s, the official incorporation of the Borough took place in 1888.  

    Private schools preceded public schools in both communities. For Manalapan, the first school on record was the Mattisonia Grammar School, founded in the Tennent area in 1766. The last of the town's eight one-room schoolhouses, Thompson Grove School, built in 1847, is pictured above. The first school in Englishtown was established in 1817 in the tavern-house (now known as the Village Inn).  According to James Brown in his book, Manalapan in Three Centuries, by 1885, Manalapan was divided into six school districts with five hundred ninety-eight students. The six districts are comparable to the six schools that comprised the district through 2001. 

    However, the student population in the 2001-2002 school year was almost ten times larger.

    In 1909, a public school was built in Englishtown on the corner of Main and Pine Streets. Today, that same school serves as the Board of Education office.  Since then, the following schools have been added to the community: 

    • Clark Mills School - 1957

    • Pine Brook School - 1966

    • Lafayette Mills School - 1968

    • Taylor Mills School - 1968

    • Milford Brook School - 1972

    • Manalapan-Englishtown Middle School (MEMS) - 1992, 2006 (addition added)

    • Wemrock Brook School - 2001

    • John I Dawes Early Learning Center (ELC) - 2007

    Manalapan and Englishtown formally joined as a regional elementary district in 1963.  That year, the population of the district was 1140. According to a September 13, 2002 article in The Star-Ledger, for the past twenty years, the Manalapan population soared within the thirty-one square miles. During that twenty years, Manalapan increased by more than seventy-five percent to approximately 34,000 residents.  In 1982, there were 3,209 students. Thirty-five years later, almost 2,000 additional students were added to the roster.  Around 1909, the Monmouth County Superintendent of Schools wrote to the State Commissioner of Education stating that there were 17,154 students and 401 teachers throughout the entire county. Today, Manalapan-Englishtown Regional School district has approximately one-third as many students as were found in the entire county in the early 1900s. As of June 2024, Manalapan-Englishtown Regional Schools had 4,720 students and employed around 1,000 staff members including substitutes.