Rockaway Valley School, Boonton Township NJ

Original Research by School Decision on Rockaway Valley School

Rockaway Valley School serves Boonton Township in Morris County, New Jersey, providing a single educational home for students from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade. Because the township has no high school, students in ninth grade and above attend Mountain Lakes High School in the neighboring borough under a sending-receiving arrangement, a factor that families moving into the community with older children will want to understand as part of their transition planning.

The enrollment at Rockaway Valley is modest for a school that covers ten grade levels, and the student body is predominantly white, with a meaningful share of Hispanic students and a smaller presence of Asian students. The share of students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch is very low, placing this school in a distinctly high-income band relative to many public schools statewide. Data on students with disabilities and English learners were not available in the record, so a full picture of special-population support is not possible from the data at hand.

On state assessments, the school shows a pattern that is strong in English language arts and more uneven in math and science. In math, results vary notably by grade. The sixth grade posted a very high proficiency rate, while fifth grade and seventh grade were lower, and third and fourth grades fell somewhere in between. In English language arts, performance was consistently high across all tested grades, with the strongest results appearing in sixth and eighth grades, where the vast majority of students scored proficient. Science testing is limited to grades five and eight. The fifth-grade science proficiency rate was moderate, while the eighth-grade science proficiency rate was notably lower, a soft spot that a parent may want to look into further with the school.

When compared across school districts in Morris County, Rockaway Valley School’s overall proficiency across tested subjects and grades lands in the top quartile. That placement signals that, taken as a whole, academic performance here sits above the midpoint among the county’s districts. The school does not serve grades that yield a graduation rate, so that metric does not apply.

The civil-rights data fields, including discipline, course access, and staffing ratios, were absent from the record, so no assessment of those dimensions can be made. Program offerings likewise were not provided.

Boonton Township itself is a low-density suburban community with no downtown or walkable commercial core; the separate Borough of Boonton, located nearby, provides the historic Main Street and transit connections along the Montclair-Boonton rail line. The township has seen very slow population growth and operates within the Highlands preservation area, which constrains large-scale development. Housing values in the area are high, reflecting the affluent character of the region, and the rental market is similarly elevated. The district’s locale brief notes that no major new developments were identified and that the township is largely built out, so the community is likely to remain stable in feel and composition for the foreseeable future.

Rockaway Valley School is the only school in the Boonton Township School District, and the district brief found no recent major changes around curriculum, property taxes, or building referendums to report. For a family considering this school, the core takeaway is a single-site, pre-K-through-eight public school in an affluent, low-density suburban township, where students move to a neighboring district for high school, and where English language arts results are strong while math and science performance shows more variability by grade level.

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Academic performance

How students perform on state tests, by grade, set against the district.

Math

Grade 369%

School 69% · District 69%

▲ 19 pts above state median · ▲ 2 pts above county median

Grade 476%

School 76% · District 76%

▲ 30 pts above state median · ▲ 11 pts above county median

Grade 556%

School 56% · District 56%

▲ 13 pts above state median · ▼ 11 pts below county median

Grade 688%

School 88% · District 88%

▲ 54 pts above state median · ▲ 33 pts above county median

Grade 761%

School 61% · District 61%

▲ 27 pts above state median · ▲ 2 pts above county median

English language arts

Grade 367%

School 67% · District 67%

▲ 21 pts above state median · ▲ 7 pts above county median

Grade 486%

School 86% · District 86%

▲ 30 pts above state median · ▲ 14 pts above county median

Grade 574%

School 74% · District 74%

▲ 20 pts above state median · even with county median

Grade 690%

School 90% · District 90%

▲ 36 pts above state median · ▲ 18 pts above county median

Grade 774%

School 74% · District 74%

▲ 17 pts above state median · ▼ 2 pts below county median

Grade 892%

School 92% · District 92%

▲ 34 pts above state median · ▲ 15 pts above county median

Science

Grade 550%

School 50% · District 50%

▲ 23 pts above state median · ▲ 3 pts above county median

Grade 832%

School 32% · District 32%

▲ 19 pts above state median · ▲ 1 pts above county median

This schoolBoonton Township School District, same grade

Graduation rate (ACGR) reflects the federally published Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate for the most recent year available. We refresh this data annually at the close of each academic year in June. The federal source publishes a banded rate (for example, "90-94%") instead of an exact number for cohorts small enough to risk identifying individual students. The state distribution chart, where shown, plots every school in the state with a published rate or band; schools whose rate is federally suppressed are excluded. Where the federal source publishes a band rather than an exact rate, the school is placed within its band using a stable, ID-derived offset, so its position is consistent across visits.