School Zones and Boundaries

What is my “home school” or “assigned school” or “attendance zone”?  What are the boundary lines that define my school zone?  If I move, will I still be within the same school zone?

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Keep in mind that school zones do change as population demographics shift.  This type of school zone change has happened somewhat recently in the Heights, and it might happen again soon, particularly in downtown Jersey City, where PS 16 Cornelia F. Bradford School is overcrowded and is busing pre-K 3, pre-K 4, and some Kindergarten students to Danforth Avenue Early Childhood Center.

But for now, here are two ways to find out your current school zone:

  1. Call JCBOE at (201) 915-6111 or (201) 915-6201 to confirm the assigned school for your precise address.  The JCBOE office records appear to be kept manually in a book or binder, and we have reason to believe they are not always 100% accurate; however, this is the official determinant, so it might be worthwhile to do your homework to confirm that JCBOE knows the correct school zone for your residence, particularly if you live near the boundary lines of multiple school zones.  As of summer 2019, JCBOE also had a school attendance zone page with an electronic copy of the book of streets and addresses that the office uses to determine what to tell you by phone.
  2. Check out this GreatSchools.com school zone map to see the area served by each Elementary, Middle, and High School.  (Grammar schools in Jersey City go to 8th grade, and they show up on the GreatSchools map under both Elementary and Middle Schools.  GreatSchools and many real estate websites source their school zone information from a data company called Pitney Bowes.
  3. Check out some documents that we found buried in obscure directories of the JCBOE website:
    • For schools in Jersey City Heights (PS 6, PS 8, PS 25, PS 26, PS 27, PS 28), take a look at page 21 of The Heights Rezoning Plan of 2017, which shows the rezoned school zones as they were approved on May 18, 2017.  The purple zone is the current school zone of PS 26 Patricia Noonan School.
    • For many other schools, check out the following images. The images were pulled from the JCBOE website before the 2019 jcboe.org website revamp, and we believe they show the school zones as of 2015.  (The only rezoning that has happened between 2015 and 2019 was in The Heights.)