An Open Letter to Trinity Hall Mothers

Trinity Hall Mothers:

Your pursuit of this school development in Middletown is an immoral one.

Every parent wants to give their children the best possible education and opportunities. But, knowingly putting other children at dramatically increased risk of death and injury for your children’s benefit is repugnant.

Trinity Hall will bring with it a significant increase in death and injuries to our community due to the increase in commercial traffic, which includes heavy commercial vehicles, buses, as well as a never before seen volume of teen-aged drivers.

This is a fact. If this project were to come to fruition, our children will be put in significantly increased risk of death and injury from bus and automobile accidents, both during and post construction.

Trinity Hall Mothers, how do you rationalize that what you are attempting has any moral underpinnings?

You know of the exponential increased risks to our children, and yet you continue to engage in biased and blind group-think, trying, but failing, to project that you are simply and innocently trying to improve your children’s station in life.

How can you look a Middletown mother in the face, and project the facade that what you are doing is just? If you told your children the truth, they would have the moral sense to tell you to stop pursuing this project.

Of course this is not just or moral.

You are strangers and interlopers with money. This is coupled with a myopic zeal to get what you want at all costs. These costs include the very fabric of our community, and the lives of our children.

There is still time. I have spoken to some of the Trinity Mothers privately and their private views are very different than those they express when under the heavy cloak of pressure in their larger group.

If you are a Trinity Mother, take some time reflect on the reality of what you are pursuing.

You will realize that you have not considered the human toll to our community for years to come.
You will realize that you can have what you want for your children, without sacrificing our children.

You have other properties to buy, which will satisfy your children’s educational needs.

To be pursuing this project in the name of being good mothers, knowing full well that our children will be paying a physical price, and our community will lose so much, is one of the greatest self-justifications I have ever encountered.


Sincerely,

Christopher R. Whalen
Concerned Parent and Chapel Hill Resident

An Open Letter To The Board of Trustees of Trinity Hall

We applaud your support of education in the Catholic tradition. We oppose your desire to establish a permanent campus in the Chapel Hill neighborhood of Middletown.

You believe that you are being exceptionally generous in endowing a new school. You are not. This is not philanthropy. This is ego.

Your ego demands that you create something new, something that will be your legacy, something that you can brag about at cocktail parties. You are well educated, presumably intelligent people. Yet, you have allowed your ego to overcome your business sense. This is not a good investment and you know it. Your own feasibility study made it clear that the demographics are not in your favor. "The potential pool of female students in the general population of Monmouth County is projected to decline for the next decade and possibly two decades." Apart from the feasibility study is the undeniable fact that Catholic schools have been closing across Monmouth County at an alarming rate.

Despite all this, you insist on destroying a quiet, peaceful neighborhood. We don't want the increased traffic, weekend track meets or drama club performances. Please take your ego and your money and renovate an existing, abandoned Catholic school. It will not destroy our neighborhood. It will cost less and you can divert the savings into more spending on teachers and programs for the students. Isn't that what education is all about? Your legacy should be the quality of the education the Trinity Hall students receive, not the building you leave behind.


Jim Mulvaney
Member of the Chapel Hill Neighborhood Group

Letter: Resident Concerned Over What Impact Trinity Hall School Will Have On Chapel Hill Neighborhood

Dear Mike,

I am a concerned citizen who will be directly affected by the proposed development in my neighborhood of the Trinity Hall School.

I am concerned about the affect this will have on my taxes, on the traffic through my street, and the traffic on Chapel Hill Road, which I must travel every day in order to get my Autistic daughter to her special needs program at Navesink School.

If you have ever had the opportunity to see what the traffic is in the older, historic, established neighborhood surrounding Navesink School, as I have, you will surely get a taste of what the development of a full-blown high school will have on Chapel Hill Road. It’s not safe by any stretch on Monmouth Avenue when the parents, buses, and walkers are trying to access the school. You can see it on the faces of the exasperated crossing guards as they desperately try and stop traffic to allow people to cross safely. You can see it on the faces of the parents with their kids who have to cross the school’s driveway in front of cars with drivers who seem oblivious to everything but quickly exiting and getting out of there.

The neighbors in the houses down the side streets have actually put large rocks on their lawns to keep parents from parking there to do drop off and pick up. Doesn’t work. They park there anyway. The traffic moves very fast, and drivers rarely slow down in the vicinity of the school.

I am sure that everyone who lives steps from that school are more than grateful when pick up and drop off are over for the day. Until the next day, when it happens all over again.

Another issue with this proposed development is we don’t even have city sewer lines run in parts of that neighborhood. In order to run the massive lines for the school, Chapel Hill Road will have to be torn open and lines installed. What will that do to the almost capacity pumping station on Sleepy Hollow, which will also be taxed by the building that will very soon commence on the Town Center site.

There is also a planned access road that will be squeezed in between two existing homes on Stavola Road. The construction of it alone will turn this once-quiet neighborhood into a construction vehicle circus. And will it truly be used for only “emergency vehicles” as Trinity claims? Or could it eventually become a cut-through for parents, students, delivery trucks, and garbage haulers? Do we really want to find out?

And how about the adjoining farmland, that belongs to the relative of the person where Trinity is now proposed. It is no secret that Trinity would like to grow to become a boarding school. What’s to stop them from acquiring that farmland and building dorms?

If this were a country, or a culture, where girls were denied a good education, then I could see a need for a single-sex school, but this not true. Our daughters do not risk their lives every day to attend class. I don’t know of one of these girls who has to worry about getting shot on their school bus for speaking out for the rights of the girls of their community to get educated.

Recently, my neighborhood received the Trinity group’s mass mailing propaganda. What I like best about the 'love us, love our school' packet is the cover letter. Paragraph three mentions their "intention" to leave over half the property undeveloped. Well, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Then, there's, "We have offered a widening of the Chapel Hill roadway, a turning lane, and perhaps, most importantly, enough roadways, parking, and holding zones on the site to adequately accommodate the busiest anticipated traffic periods each weekday morning and afternoon." Followed by, "We hope that we have your support now...(or will) decrease your concerns to some degree...."

How can you “decrease concerns” about plans to completely decimate our neighborhood, our land, our country road, our sanity, and the serene peace and quiet that have been our lives for many years, never mind infiltrating our lives for months as this goes on, and for years to come?

By contrast, the 19 houses, which the land owner already has permission to build, and which that land is also zoned for, would each require a few feet of driveway, and a single two-way street. There was no need for a traffic or feasibility study, no need to change the complexion of the neighborhood, or add a turning lane or widen Chapel Hill Road. Further, the proposal did not receive opposition from the surrounding neighbors; in fact, he could have broken ground and started to build years ago.

We are by far one of the most affluent of towns, with a better quality public education system, and a higher calibre of teacher than most of the surrounding townships. And didn’t we all just pass a referendum to repair our public schools?

We are sorely lacking in nothing here, except the diminishing, precious open spaces that made Middletown the beautiful place that is was when we moved here and started families. We are all getting older as well. Has anyone consider the impact of at least 200 additional driving teens and what that will do to the locals just trying to get out of their driveways?

In closing, we don’t want this school, and do not plan to send our children to this school.

Perhaps the founders, to be the good neighbors they claim to want to be, can work with the local, established, truly Catholic schools to meet the needs of their students. These same schools have seen a decrease in their enrollments as have all the public schools, Our latest census figures for our town show we have had zero population growth.. Perhaps they can revisit any of their 30 initial search locations again.

And for all they speak of empowering women, their Head Board Chair is a man.

Go figure.

Margie R.
Member of the Chapel Hill Neighborhood Group

Giving Equal Time To Viewpoint Of A Trinity Hall Supporter

I received the following correspondence from Lisa Calandrino, a 40 year Middletown resident who reached out to me via Facebook. She read Jennifer Valencia's "No Vacancy For Trinity Hall! Proposed Development Not A Fit For Historic Chapel Hill Neighborhood" blog post yesterday and wanted to tell her story as to why she supports Trinity Hall. Seeing how I really don't have a "dog in this fight", I have no problem giving a little equal time to an opposing viewpoint :

I write this letter as a nearly life-long resident of Middletown; as a working mom actively involved in my children’s public and private education. I have served as a class mother, as a PTA Treasurer and multiple time director of my children’s school’s annual fundraiser. I am also a fervent supporter of the new Trinity Hall High School for girls here in Middletown, both at their interim location at Croydon Hall and their proposed future permanent campus on Chapel Hill Road. 

I grew up in the Chapel Hill area and I am a graduate of St. Mary’s grammar school, Mater Dei High School and Rosemont College. A Catholic education isn’t for everyone, but in retrospect it was important for me. An all-girls college education was equally important to me and an opportunity I wish was available as a Middletown resident in high school.

When it came time to send my daughter to high school it was her decision where to go. She probably wouldn’t admit it, but she saw first-hand how well a single-sex Catholic high school education was working out for her older brother at CBA and I believe it is why she chose Trinity Hall. It wasn’t without its risks, being part of the inaugural freshmen class of only 30 girls in an entire school, but she was up for the challenge and I am proud of her for it. The thing I’m most proud of is that she’s thriving, as much as her brother, and I can’t imagine what more I can ask for as a parent.

I can’t fathom why something as innocuous and positive as a relatively small faith-based all girls’ high school moving into someone else’s backyard or neighborhood would cause them distress. I live within steps of Thompson Middle School and it doesn’t make me feel any less safe. I also live within steps of Nut Swamp Elementary and I do not believe the new athletic field has had an adverse impact on the environment. I am less than a minute drive to Oak Hill Academy but don’t see where it’s location has had an adverse impact on my taxes or property value and I live less than a two minute drive to Middletown South High School and don’t see where the traffic it generates has had a negative impact on my quality of life.

Fellow residents of Middletown, don’t be fooled by the misinformation the opposition is sharing. Trinity Hall is good for girls, good for parents and good for the community. Even if you will never send your daughter there, it deserves your support. Why shouldn’t girls have the same educational opportunities as boys? I wish you can see it first hand, when you look into the eyes of these eager young women you can see the history they are about to write. Let us join together and give them the ink to make it happen.

Lisa Calandrino
Middletown Resident