Early this week, New Jersey blew $400 million in federal education aid after botching the application process. Now the other shoe has dropped. Gov. Chris Christie has fired Bret Schundler, the state education commissioner who had shepherded the bid. According to our state news partner, NewJerseyNewsroom.com, Schundler had told the governor that New Jersey...
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New Jersey Monthly magazine is out with its biannual ranking of the top high schools in the state and the No. 1 school is … not Verona. It was Millburn, again. We finished finished in exactly the same place in 2010 as we did in 2008: 53rd. The magazine ranked 322 high schools in...
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They’ve been practicing in the heat, they’ve been practicing in the rain. Now, they finally get to strut their stuff–literally. The Verona Marching Maroon and White will give a free preview of its fall show, “Tchaikovsky Resurrected”, tomorrow night (Thursday, August 26) at 8:30 p.m. on Centennial Field. That’s the turf field with the...
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New Jersey was believed to be one of the leading contenders for a huge pool of federal money earmarked for education reform. But according to a report in the Star Ledger, the Christie administration filled out the application for the Race To The Top program incorrectly and lost what might have been a $400...
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Tess Langan wanted to go to Africa with her favorite journalist, but she wasn’t old enough. But now she’s going anyway, thanks to a gap-year program she learned about from him. On September 15, Langan, the daughter of MyVeronaNJ co-founder Julia Martin Langan, leaves for San Francisco, the first step in a journey that...
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Howard Freund, a fixture in the H.B. Whitehorne Middle School music department for more than a decade, will replace Jeffrey Monacelli as vice principal at the school. Brian Michalowski, who directed Seussical Jr. at HBW this past spring, will join the school’s music department full time, along with Dan Halpern, whose appointment has already...
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Class of 2010 graduate Amy Janett had originally assumed she’d attend college in the Northeast. She was interested in a liberal arts college, and there are plenty within a few hours drive of Verona. She’d seen them firsthand two years prior when she’d tagged along on her brother Mark’s college-hunting trips. (He ended up...
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Emily Fitzpatrick faced a lot of questions about her college plans. If you want to go into health care, she was asked, why aren’t you going to med school? Why do you want to do nursing instead? To Fitzpatrick, who graduated from Verona High School this past June with the Class of 2010, the...
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Dan Halpern, formerly the director of the Franklin, New Jersey, Middle School Band and Jazz Band, has been hired to replace H.B. Whitehorne music teacher David Tintle, who retired this June after 22 years with Verona’s music program. According to Superintendent Charles Sampson, Halpern has worked as assistant marching band director at Verona High...
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Daisy Bourne, Claire Spardel and Kara Bartow, juniors who study Mandarin at VHS, traveled to China in July. The trip was organized through Rutgers University’s branch of the Beijing-based Confucius Institute. The group, which included students from all over the state and country, toured The Great Wall, Tiananmen Square and The Forbidden City in...
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