Jackson Liberty High School is a four-year comprehensive public high school serving students in ninth through twelfth grades from Jackson Township, in Ocean County, New Jersey, operating as part of the Jackson School District. It is the district's newest secondary school and is the sister high school of Jackson Memorial High School.
As of the 2021–22 school year, the school had an enrollment of 1,129 students and 85.1 classroom teachers (on an FTE basis), for a student–teacher ratio of 13.3:1. There were 320 students (28.3% of enrollment) eligible for free lunch and 76 (6.7% of students) eligible for reduced-cost lunch.
History and design
The school opened in September 2006 with 800 students in 9th and 10th grades. The school was constructed at a cost of $70 million (equivalent to $ million in ) with a maximum capacity of 1,900 students in grades 9-12. The school stands at two stories and on a parcel of land, and features 85 classrooms, a 1,800-seat gymnasium, and about a dozen athletic fields.
Built in between 2005 and 2006, the school has two floors. The bottom floor holds a liberal arts (history, English, language) wing (commonly referred to as "C" wing) as well as a mathematics and science wing. (Commonly referred to as "B" wing) There is a cafeteria in both wings. The upstairs wing will hold additional mathematics and science wings. Additionally "D" wing is home to the arts (fine art, television production, CAD, graphic design) classes. A central atrium ("A" wing) connects "D", "C", and "B" wings into a central great hallway. The theater holds about 900 people and is equipped to handle presentations as well as performances. The two gymnasiums are next to each other and they have a weight room and an athletic trainer's office. The football field is surrounded by a regulation size track which could be used for meets. There is also a music wing behind the auditorium and a lecture hall in the atrium. Jackson Liberty High School is Wi-Fi ready and wireless LAN stations are set up throughout the school. Teachers are given swivel-head laptops which have a wireless card which connect them to projectors in each classroom. All multimedia functions from the classroom projectors. The student-run television channel, JLib Today, as well as a DVD and VCR hook up to the projector for large format display. The school auditorium is suited to seat 799 people and is equipped with state-of-the-art lighting and sound systems.
Awards, recognition and rankings
The school was the 128th-ranked public high school in New Jersey out of 339 schools statewide in New Jersey Monthly magazine's September 2014 cover story on the state's "Top Public High Schools", using a new ranking methodology. The school had been ranked 218th in the state of 328 schools in 2012, after being ranked 215th in 2010 out of 322 schools listed.
Schooldigger.com ranked the school as tied for 129th out of 376 public high schools statewide in its 2010 rankings (an increase of 67 positions from the 2009 rank) which were based on the combined percentage of students classified as proficient or above proficient on the language arts literacy and mathematics components of the High School Proficiency Assessment (HSPA).
Athletics
The Jackson Liberty High School compete in Division B South of the Shore Conference, an athletic conference comprised of public and private high schools in Monmouth and Ocean counties along the Jersey Shore. The league operates under the jurisdiction of the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association (NJSIAA). With 833 students in grades 10-12, the school was classified by the NJSIAA for the 2019–20 school year as Group III for most athletic competition purposes, which included schools with an enrollment of 761 to 1,058 students in that grade range. The school was classified by the NJSIAA as Group III South for football for 2022–2024, which included schools with 680 to 889 students.
The school participates as the host school / lead agency in a joint ice hockey team with Jackson Memorial High School and Point Pleasant Borough High School. The co-op program operates under agreements scheduled to expire at the end of the 2023–24 school year.
Jackson Liberty has its student section, the Red Zone, in which students wearing a red zone shirt receive free admission to home football and basketball games. Liberty has a section at the football games for the red zone in the bleachers behind the left end zone. The red zone plays a part in pep rallies, and all around school spirit.