John Adams Elementary School

This school is great in general. The staff and principal are willing and able to help with your concerns. Sometimes your child will fall behind academically because they have a substitute more than half of the year as a parent then you have to pay for private tutoring because they get behind on the studies.

For parents whose children have been injured and ignored, I implore you to demand an immediate move to Livingston Park Elementary. My child was injured thrice at John Adams and was not taken to the nurse. On all three occasions the teacher AND the principal denied that the highly visible bruises happened at school. Thankfully the last time we had taken pictures during pick-up and we were able to catch them red-handed. We brought the incident to the superintendent's attention but she did not take any action. At this point we provided an ultimatum-- we needed our child to be moved to a different school as John Adams was unable to provide a safe environment. We left messages on the attendance helpline every morning to the effect that John Adams was unsafe, and it took the District just three days to make the arrangements we wanted. The staff at this school are not in the least concerned about the safety of our children, and neither the superintendent nor the board cares or perhaps dares to stand up to them.

The only reason John Adams still has a Pre-K program is there are not enough seats in the other North Brunswick elementary schools. The new Pre-K teacher they hired is not qualified to teach in an elementary school, let alone Pre-K, yet she was brought in because she is politically aligned with the new Principal. The teacher is rude, impatient and has the language skills of a middle-schooler. Instead of encouraging toddlers to play, socialize and engage in conversation, she keeps them tied to their desks and crams them with homework. Nobody has a vision for the school, and the Pre-K program runs without any supervision. Closing it down would be doing our community a service.

I wouldn't recommend this school to no one, especially for special education students. My was assaulted by another student while using the bathroom(last year) and he reported to his teacher at the time, the teacher failed to report this incident . This year within so far my son has been restrained multiple times , which one of the times is in question (the school behaviorist restrained my son and lied about it and the school doesn't care), within the last couple of days my son was restrained and was not provided medical attention afterwards (the nurse left early and no school nurse was on staff at the times the school psychologist and his teacher restrained him more then once) , my son now his a bruise on his arm the size of a adult thumb . The excuse from the school psychologist was " I'm sorry, it was a chaotic day, I forgot. '' Please keep in my mind I had a few interactions with the psychologist #1 when he first notified me of the incident. #2 when I picked my son up from school and all involved parties had a debrief of what took place.#3 the next morning when we had a zoom progress meeting . Not one time did he ever mention that medical attention wasn't provided to my son or that the nurse wasn't present at school. The problem is we leave our children in the hands of people who only care about a PAYCHECK . Please keep a open dialogue with your children especially special needs children even if their non verbal .

Folks need to reset their expectations when sending a child to John Adams. Not only is this a public school, but it is objectively the worst elementary school in North Brunswick, which is among the poorer performing schools in the state. Remember the quality of a teacher in a public school is a crapshoot, more so in the case of John Adams where bad teachers come to stay while good ones use their 1-2 year experience to move on to better opportunities. Recruitment has gotten worse under the new principal who hires her friends from neighboring school districts like New Brunswick and defends them when they don't deliver. As long as the school hires teachers from districts worse than itself, John Adams has nowhere to go but down.