Union County Educational Services Commission

Enrollment over time

In 2025-26 it enrolled 327 students. That is 41 more than in 1998-99 (286) — the district has grown. It peaked at 364 in 2019-20.

Total students enrolled each fall. Source: NJDOE Fall Enrollment.

What the district looks like

In 1998-99, 55% of students were Black. By 2025-26 the largest group was Hispanic, at 49%.

Each group’s share of enrollment over time, or its head count — toggle above. New Jersey expanded race and ethnicity reporting from five to seven categories in 2006-07 (dashed line), so “two or more races” appears only after; Asian here includes Pacific Islander. Source: NJDOE Fall Enrollment.

How much the mix changed

Between 2021-22 and 2025-26 the makeup of this district barely moved.

The index is half the sum of every group’s change in share, on a 0–100 scale (how it works). It is computed from the same counts as the makeup chart above — source: NJDOE Fall Enrollment. Compare any two years in the explorer →

Free or reduced-price lunch

In 2025-26, 44.3% of students were certified for free or reduced-price lunch.

Share of students certified for free or reduced-price meals, through a household application or an automatic match. The lighter line shows Union County, for comparison. Some districts serve free meals to every student under the Community Eligibility Provision. Those districts often stop collecting household income forms, so their reported share can run below the number of low-income students they enroll. Source: NJDOE Fall Enrollment.

Budget

Suspension here since 2017-18

New Jersey has published a district suspension figure in eight school years, 2017-18 through 2024-25. It published none before that: the 2015-16 edition has no district workbook at all and the 2016-17 one has no removals sheet in it. This district carries a figure in eight of them, and six of those sit inside the part of the record New Jersey says can be compared. The two editions New Jersey excludes from that comparable record are shown here anyway, outside the line, in its own words.

Each point is the share of this district’s own students suspended at least once that school year — one student counted once however many times they were suspended. The dashed line is New Jersey. The line stops at 2018-19 and starts again at 2021-22. The two years in between are drawn as hollow marks inside the shaded band because NJDOE printed, inside both of those workbooks, that their discipline data may not be comparable with the years either side — its words are below. Schools statewide were shut for part of spring 2020 and much of 2020-21, and the fall in those two years is very largely a fall in the number of children in a building, not in what they did. A year with no mark is a year New Jersey did not give this district a number; the table has which kind of not-giving it was.

2019-20, in New Jersey’s own words. Due to school closures in spring 2020, discipline data for the 2019-2020 school year may not be comparable to prior or future school years and NJDOE recommends caution in making comparisons.NJDOE, sheet “Important 2019-2020 Notes” inside the 2019-20 district and State data file. The sheet is not linked from the download page and nothing in the numbers hints that it exists.

2020-21, in New Jersey’s own words. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, discipline data for the 2020-2021 school year may not be comparable to prior or future school years and NJDOE recommends caution in making comparisons.NJDOE, sheet “Important 2020-2021 Notes” inside the 2020-21 district and State data file. The sheet is not linked from the download page and nothing in the numbers hints that it exists.

Where the figure sits in the file changed in 2023-24. Through 2022-23 the sheet had one row per district and this was that row; from 2023-24 the sheet is one row per student group and this is the group called Districtwide, then All Students. The quantity did not change and no break is drawn there — NJDOE prints it under the same column name, AnySusp_Count, in 2017-18 and again in 2024-25, with one edition in between spelling it #StudentsAnySuspension and then changing back.

What has a record, and how long

What is not drawn here

There is no trend by student group, and this page does not draw one. New Jersey has published suspension broken out by race, sex, income and disability exactly twice — 2023-24 and 2024-25 — and it changed the categories between them. Asian and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander were separate groups in the first year and one merged group in the second; Hispanic became Hispanic/Latino; the district total was called Districtwide and is now All Students. Seven labels came through unchanged. Two points would not be a trend even if all fifteen had, and the two race categories cannot be added back together for the earlier year because either of them may be withheld. The section below shows the current year in full. When New Jersey publishes a third edition on the categories it uses now, this becomes a series and gets a chart; until then it is two years, and they are shown as two years.

The same boundary is why only suspension has a line above it. Students referred to police and students involved in an incident leading to arrest are published by student and by grade only from 2023-24, on sheets that did not exist before — and the arrest sheet names its own columns ArrestedCount in one edition and PoliceCount in the next. An arrest figure does appear on the removals sheet from 2017-18 to 2022-23, but joining it to the later sheet would be this site deciding that two differently-named columns on two different sheets are one measure, which is exactly the decision the publisher declined to make.

On reading one district back to 2017-18. The evidence that a district code names this district begins 2020-08-11. For the editions before that, a code that resolves is a verified code rather than a verified district: it says the number is a current NJDOE organization and says nothing about what that code named in that school year. New Jersey merges and regionalizes districts, so read the early end of this line as the record filed under this code, not as a promise that the same schools were inside it.

These are reported removals — a record of decisions adults made, one row per school year in eight separate publications. A district that suspends less may be behaving differently, recording differently, or reporting differently, and this file cannot tell a reader which. Nothing here is a safety measure or a measure of school quality, and no figure on this page is compared with a figure from any other dataset on it. Assembled from the eight district workbooks, most recently the 2024-25 School Performance Report data file. How this data works →

Which students are disciplined here

New Jersey publishes, for each student group and each grade, the share of that group’s own students who were suspended at least once, referred to police, or involved in an incident that led to an arrest. These are three separate administrative acts, kept apart here and never added together: a police notification is not an arrest, and none of the three is a measure of safety. Of the 33 group figures on this page, 13 carry a rate, 3 are a published zero — the state saying nobody, not the state saying nothing — and 17 were withheld.

Each dot is one student group’s own suspension rate — the share of that group’s students, not its share of the district’s suspensions. Groups New Jersey did not publish keep their row and carry no dot, with the reason written in place. That matters here more than in most charts: withholding runs inversely to group size, so a chart of only the published groups would redraw discipline as something that happens to the largest groups. A smaller dot is a rate the state published on one to four students: it is a real published figure and it is drawn in place, but a rate built on that few students moves a great deal with one student more or less — read it with the headcount printed beside it, not on its own. The hollow ring is the district as a whole.

1.6% a rate the state calculatedNone a printed zero — nobodyFewer than 5 a masked headcount of 0–4 — often a zeroWithheld below the state’s reporting thresholda smaller dot a published rate resting on 1–4 students — thin, not withheld

By grade

New Jersey published nothing at all for American Indian or Alaska Native, Non-binary or undesignated and Two or More Races in this district. That is a statement about how few students are in the group, not about how they behave. Where a rate appears with no headcount beside it, New Jersey published the percentage and withheld the number. It does this for male and female students almost everywhere — statewide it withholds 12,467 of 12,654 district headcounts for each while withholding only 2,040 of the matching percentages. Some rates here rest on one to four students. They are the state’s own published figures and they are shown in full — in the table with their headcount, and on the chart as a smaller dot — because leaving them out would hide a number New Jersey did publish behind the same blank the state uses for the ones it did not. Read them with the headcount: one student in a group of ten prints as 10%, and the next student would move it to 20%. The groups overlap — a student can be counted as Hispanic, economically disadvantaged and classified as having a disability at once — so these rows never add up to the district row, and no ratio between two of them is computed here. Two groups withheld at different rates cannot be compared by division.

On the arrest column. NJDOE names the underlying fields PoliceCount and PolicePercent while its own layout defines them as all incidents leading to arrest — the defect it records is Source field says Police; layout defines all incidents leading to arrest. It is shown as published and not reconciled against the separate police-notification column above it.

These are reported incidents and the responses adults chose, and they measure how a district records and refers at least as much as how its students behave: a district that documents diligently and calls police readily will look worse here than a district that handles the same behaviour informally. Nothing on this page is a safety score, a crime rate, or a measure of school quality, and none of the three measures may be added to the others. One school year, 2024-25, so there is no trend. Row Database_DistrictStateDetail.xlsx#RemovalsStudentGroupGrade!12600:AnySusp_Pct of the 2024-25 School Performance Report data file. How this data works →

How the state has judged this district

The waiver record. Annual editions between 2012 and 2016, most recent first. Read each band against itself and not against the others — the state changed what it measured, and how, twice inside those five years.

New Jersey’s ESEA Flexibility waiver ended after the 2016 edition, and the archive bundles for 2017 and 2018 return 404 on every build of the source release. That bounds the waiver record; it says nothing about the ESSA record above, which runs from 2016-17 without a break the state did not itself declare.

The waiver determinations are what New Jersey printed on this district’s annual ESEA accountability profile, kept exactly as printed and corrected from nothing. Each edition’s glyphs are read against that edition’s own legend, because the same asterisk means different things in different years. Editions this district does not appear in are simply absent here; no year is inferred from its neighbours. Source: NJDOE’s Title I accountability archive, 2012–2016.

How the 2012–2016 waiver record works →

Schools in this district

The district’s 8 schools on record. Open any for its full profile.

Every school the district has reported, with its grade span and its most recent fall head count; a school with no current-year count is shown as closed after its last one. Source: NJDOE Fall Enrollment.