Original Research by School Decision on Lodi High School
Lodi High School serves the borough of Lodi, a densely populated suburban community in Bergen County. The borough is a compact, built-out place where residential streets and commercial corridors sit close together, shaped by a history of textile and chemical manufacturing along the Saddle River. Today it is a family-oriented community with a modest collegiate presence from Felician University. The housing market reflects the pressures common to the region. Homes in Lodi’s zip code are priced above the national median, though below the Bergen County median listing price, and have been appreciating steadily. Rent is high relative to income, and buying a home typically costs more each month than renting, which shapes the kind of household that can settle here. The borough has little vacant land, so the housing supply is essentially fixed, and population growth has been modest.
Lodi High School is a regular public high school serving grades nine through twelve and is the sole comprehensive high school in the Lodi School District. Enrollment is close to a thousand students, spread fairly evenly across the four grade levels. The student body is majority Hispanic, with a white population as the next largest group, followed by Black and Asian students. Over half of the students come from households that qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a clear indicator that this is a school serving a community with significant economic need. Information on the share of students with disabilities and English learners was not available in the data reviewed, which leaves an incomplete picture of the school’s special population support structure.
State testing data was not available for this school. Without that set of results, it is not possible to characterize overall academic proficiency in math, English language arts, or science, or to place achievement relative to other high schools in Bergen County. The data also does not include a reported four-year graduation rate, chronic absenteeism figures, or disciplinary data. This creates a significant gap for any parent or resident trying to assess academic outcomes, student engagement, or school climate. The absence of these metrics may reflect the nature of the data available at the time of collection, but the result is the same: the standard public measures one would look to for a high school are not accounted for here.
The district, meanwhile, has moved through a period of steady, modest tax increases. For several consecutive budget cycles, the school board approved budgets with a tax levy increase of about two percent. The cumulative effect is a predictable, incremental rise in the school tax bill for homeowners, though the district states it has maintained all programs and services through each of these budgets. In 2023, the district also filed a major amendment to its Long Range Facility Plan, identifying a substantial sum in needed facility improvements across all seven schools in the district, including roof replacements, HVAC upgrades, and security enhancements. This signals that the district is aware of deferred maintenance and is beginning to plan for it, though the funding path for that scale of work is not yet fully clear.
The school itself sits within a borough where civic anchors like Borough Hall, the firehouses, and the volunteer ambulance squad form the public infrastructure, and major highways like Route 17 and Interstate 80 run through town, giving students and families access to a wide regional job and education market. The district’s elementary and middle schools are spread across the borough, so students come from different neighborhood school experiences before arriving at this one building on Putnam Street.
For a family considering Lodi High School, the honest answer is that too much of the standard record is missing to give a confident assessment. Without state testing data or a graduation rate, there is no way to measure academic performance or compare it to other schools. The school appears to serve a diverse, economically mixed student body in a densely built community where housing costs are high relative to national averages and where the district is incrementally raising taxes while planning for major facility work. A parent would want to ask the school directly for its most recent academic results, graduation figures, and information on how it supports students who are English learners or receive special education services. Those conversations would fill in the blanks that the available data leaves open.
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