Christopher Columbus Middle School

Enrollment, by grade

In 2025-26 it enrolled 945 students across grades 6–8. That is 79 fewer than in 1998-99 (1,024) — the school has shrunk. It peaked at 1,306 in 2004-05. Its biggest cohort is grade 8.

Students enrolled in each grade each fall, stacked to the total — so the top edge is total enrollment. Bands run from the lowest grade (light) to the highest (dark); a band that appears or disappears is a grade the school added or dropped. “Other” is students with no grade level (mostly special education), so the bands always sum to total. Source: NJDOE Fall Enrollment.

What the school looks like

In 1998-99, 53% of students were White. By 2025-26 the largest group was Hispanic, at 70%.

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 school 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, 73.5% 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 lines show the district overall and Woodrow Wilson Middle School, 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.

Test scores

Growth measures how much students progressed over the year against peers who scored the same the year before — 50 is a typical year. In 2024-25, this school’s median growth percentile was 42 in English and 46 in math — NJ calls this “typical” growth.

In each panel the flat line is the proficiency boundary: levels 4–5 (met or exceeded) fill the area above it, levels 1–3 below — so a smaller reported share in levels 4–5 makes the area above the line shrink (it isn’t a misleading upward slope). Light = level 1 (did not yet meet expectations), dark = level 5 (exceeded); the % marks the proficient share at the first and last points. The first set of panels follows each grade across the years; the second lines up aggregate grade results one grade higher each year. It approximates a class cohort, not linked individual students. Growth is the median Student Growth Percentile (50 = a typical year), reported only through grade 8. The NJSLA was not given in spring 2020 and was disrupted the next year. Source: NJ School Performance Reports.

Chronic absenteeism

In 2024-25, 17.1% of students were chronically absent — missing at least 10% of school days — up from 13.3% in 2015-16.

Chronic absenteeism — the share of students who missed 10% or more of the days they were enrolled (roughly 18 days across a full school year). The lighter lines show the district overall and New Jersey, for comparison. The current workbook publishes four years of this measure; the years before them come from each earlier year’s own workbook, which publish the same figures wherever the two overlap. The statewide line starts in 2021-22, because that is the first edition in which NJDOE printed a statewide rate beside each school’s own. Points from 2018-19 and earlier are matched to this school by its state code; New Jersey’s organization record only reaches back to 2020-08-11, so for those years the code is verified and the identity behind it is not. Source: NJ School Performance Reports, 2015-16 through 2024-25.

How the state has judged this school

Everything below this line is a different instrument. Above, one weighted number and a rank inside a group of similar schools, under ESSA. Below, a pass-or-fail determination the state made about each student group, on tests that no longer exist, under a federal waiver that has since ended. The two regimes meet without a gap — 2015-16 is the last waiver year and 2016-17 the first ESSA one — and there is still no fair comparison between them, so this page does not draw one.

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 regime changes here. Above this line the state judged participation alone; below it, participation and performance against an individually set target, on a different test. A determination on one side of this line cannot be compared with one on the other, so nothing on this page draws a line through it.

The waiver determinations are what New Jersey printed on this school’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 school 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 ESSA record works →  ·  How the 2012–2016 waiver record works →