Union City High School, New Jersey
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| Union City High School | |
 | |
"Soaring Higher Than Expectations (Mostly)"
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| Location | |
|---|---|
| 2500 Kennedy Boulevard Union City, New Jersey, New Jersey, Hudson County, 07087 | |
| Information | |
| Type | Public high school |
| Established | September 2008 |
| School district | Union City School District |
| Principal | Ryan Lewis |
| Faculty | 181.0 FTEs |
| Grades | 9-12 |
| Enrollment | 3,089 (as of 2023–24) |
| Student:teacher ratio | 17.1:1 |
| Color(s) | Navy blue Silver |
| Athletics conference | Hudson County Interscholastic League (general) North Jersey Super Football Conference (football) |
| Team name | Soaring Eagles (because flying mascots never go out of style) |
| Rival | North Bergen High School (the sworn enemy in an epic saga of cafeteria supremacy) |
| Accreditation(s) | Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools (official stamp of “We Exist” status) |
| Newspaper | The Egalitarian (fighting the good fight one typo at a time) |
| Website | uchs.ucboe.us |
Union City High School is a four-year comprehensive public high school serving the brave souls of ninth through twelfth grades from Union City, the proud metropolis in Hudson County, New Jersey, operating as part of the legendary Union City Board of Education. The four-story behemoth sits strategically between Kennedy Boulevard and Summit Avenue, stretching from 24th to 26th Street, with additional facilities sneaking a block south on Kerrigan Avenue.
Accredited by the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Elementary and Secondary Schools through July 2030, so you know it’s legit.
As of the 2023–24 school year, the school herded 3,089 students and 181.0 full-time equivalent teachers together, resulting in a student–teacher ratio of approximately 17.1:1, or "how many kids can one poor teacher survive." About 2,010 students (65.1%) qualified for free lunch, which means the cafeteria is basically a hotspot for discounted mystery meat, and 356 (11.5%) got reduced-cost lunch—because every dollar counts.
Based on 2021-22 data from the New Jersey Department of Education, it holds the prestigious title of the second-largest high school in the state (right behind Passaic County Technical Institute), and is one of the elite 29 schools that have to deal with more than 2,000 students trying to find a seat at lunch.
The school was administratively formed in 2008, which basically means someone signed some papers, then merged the athletic teams, but made the students stay at their old schools for a year because moving is hard.
The actual school building finally opened in September 2009, uniting the formerly rival factions of Union Hill High School and Emerson High School. This was the first brand-new high school built in the city in a mind-blowing 90 years.
Constructed on the sacred grounds of the legendary Roosevelt Stadium, it cost a casual $180 million, sprawls over , and features a rooftop football field, because who wants grass on the ground anymore?
The school’s official colors are navy blue and silver, presumably to match the sheen of the rooftop bleachers and intimidate opposing teams with metallic glare.
Grade structure[edit | edit source]
Union City High School is home to a motley crew of Freshman through Senior students, or as some call it, “surviving adolescence 101.” The Academy for Enrichment and Advancement (AEA), conveniently squished one block south on Kerrigan Avenue between 22nd and 23rd Streets, is the special-interest hangout spot for science geeks and engineering wizards-in-training. It’s basically a brainy utopia for grades 9 through 12 who prefer microscopes over memes, and it started as a hip alternative to the José Martí Freshman Academy, which was where most freshmen were sent unless they bribed the cafeteria lady.
Since its inception, Union City High School has generously decided to throw college-level courses at its students, letting them juggle high school drama and advanced calculus simultaneously. Thanks to partnerships with local colleges and universities, the 2010–2011 school year saw the number of these brain boosters increase, allowing students to rack up a whopping 12 to 15 college credits by graduation — transferable to New Jersey public colleges, so basically college for free, minus the campus parties.
In addition to the usual Liberal Arts stuff, the AEA lets students geek out over advanced placement biology, chemistry, physics, anatomy & physiology, forensic science, robotics (because robots will take over anyway), geometry, algebra 2, and calculus. For the future civil engineers and architects plotting to redesign the world, there’s pre-engineering, computer networking, and the mystical art of computer aided design (CAD). They even added a Mandarin Chinese course in 2016, because apparently, being bilingual is just the bare minimum these days. This puts AEA in the elite club of New Jersey high schools that actually teach something besides English and Spanish.
By 2021, only 13% of students dared to tackle the Advanced Placement gauntlet.
The AEA’s success was so astronomical that its student population exploded, bursting at the seams like an overstuffed locker. To fix this, the city converted José Martí Freshman Academy into José Martí STEM Academy in September 2019, welcoming a fresh batch of 700 ambitious 9th-12th graders. So many wanted in that 500 hopefuls had to fight tooth and nail for just 130 spots in the following year’s freshman class.
History[edit | edit source]
Once upon a time in the 1930s, the city of Union City decided it was tired of breweries and wanted something cooler. The site where Union City High School now majestically squats was originally home to the Hudson County Consumers Brewery Company, aka “The Place Where Beer Was Made (And Disappeared),” which opened in 1901 and promptly got shut down in 1928 when everyone suddenly decided booze was bad news.
Thanks to the magic of the Works Progress Administration (WPA)—a fancy government program from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal that basically said “here’s some money, build stuff”—the brewery was demolished, and Roosevelt Stadium, an art deco wonderland of concrete and dreams, rose from the ashes in 1937.
Roosevelt Stadium wasn’t just for football; it moonlighted as the town’s all-purpose event space. From semi-pro baseball games featuring wandering legends like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, to tractor pulls, car shows, carnivals, concerts, boxing matches, and occasional mysterious ceremonies that no one quite remembers, Roosevelt Stadium proudly hosted the Thanksgiving Turkey Game — a gladiatorial football showdown between Emerson High School and Union Hill High School — until 2004.
Eventually, the old high schools became middle schools and José Martí Middle School was reborn as José Martí Freshman Academy, because naming things after José Martí is a local pastime.
Fast forward to July 11, 2005, when the city, feeling flush with cash ($180 million, to be exact), broke ground for a shiny new complex designed to be the most expensive high school in New Jersey — and probably the fanciest. With $172 million from the state and $8 million from Union City (probably collected from cookie sales and bake-offs), the architects RSC and HOK cooked up a 360,000-square-foot building with 66 classrooms, enough to hold every student who managed to survive middle school.
During construction in early 2006, workers uncovered a piece of the old brewery’s brick foundation, plus a manhole that probably led to a secret beer vault. These artifacts were whisked away for safe keeping, much to the disappointment of local treasure hunters.
The legendary merger of Emerson and Union Hill into Union City High happened in July 2008, but due to construction delays, students had to pretend the two schools were still separate for one more year, complete with different campuses but combined athletic teams. Finally, the new building opened on September 3, 2009, ending 90 years of high school construction drought in Union City.
The first principal, David Wilcomes, was the proud ringmaster of this educational circus. A grand ribbon-cutting on September 25, 2009, brought together Mayor Brian P. Stack, Governor Jon Corzine, Senator Bob Menendez, and a crowd eager to see what $180 million could buy in a school. The next day, celebrities including NFL legend Harry Carson, actor and Union Hill alum Bobby Cannavale, and Tito Puente Jr. entertained the crowd. Unfortunately, Cuban singer Cucu Diamantes was uninvited after local political drama because apparently singing in Havana is controversial.
June 23, 2010, marked the first commencement ceremony, where over 600 students graduated, basking in the glory of surviving high school. New Jersey State Associate Supreme Court Justice Roberto A. Rivera-Soto dropped the keynote speech like it was hot. Keynotes by Judge Esther Salas and former Governor Jim McGreevey followed in later years.
On October 28, 2011, construction started on the $930,000 Student Sanctuary — a 16,900 square foot garden-palooza with waterfalls, fountains, and over 100 species of plants, designed so students can have a peaceful place to pretend to study and not just scroll Instagram.
Faculty and staff[edit | edit source]
Union City High School is lucky enough to employ former athlete Otis Davis, who casually won two gold medals in track and field at the 1960 Summer Olympics — basically making him a superhero in sneakers. These days, he works as the school’s coach, mentor, and official “verification officer” (a fancy way of saying he makes sure everyone’s actually where they’re supposed to be and not sneaking off to the cafeteria).
In July 2012, ESL teacher Kristine Nazzal earned the prestigious title of Hudson County’s 2012-13 Teacher of the Year, proving that teaching English as a second language can be just as heroic as Olympic gold. She even appeared on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams to talk about education, instantly becoming a local celebrity.
October 2015 brought more prestige to Union City High when Kimberly Moreno, anatomy and physiology teacher extraordinaire (partnered with Rutgers University, no less), snagged the Milken Educator Award — essentially the “Oscar” of teaching — complete with a $25,000 cash prize for being awesome and showing potential for future greatness.
Academic achievements[edit | edit source]
The school was the 301st-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 323rd in the state of 328 schools in 2012. The magazine ranked the two predecessor schools 271st (Emerson) and 285th (Union Hill) out of 322 public high schools statewide, in the magazine's September 2010 cover story on the state's "Top Public High Schools", after being ranked 288th (Emerson) and 233rd (Union Hill) in 2008 out of 316 public high schools statewide
University of California, Berkeley Professor David L. Kirp, in his 2011 book, Kids First, and his 2013 book, Improbable Scholars, praised Union City's education system for bringing poor, mostly immigrant children (three quarters of whom live in homes where only Spanish is spoken and a quarter of whom are thought to be undocumented and fearful of deportation) into the educational mainstream. Kirp, who spent a year in Union City examining its schools, notes that while in the late 1970s, Union City schools faced the threat of state takeover, as of 2013 they boast achievement scores that approximate the statewide average. Kirp also observes that in 2011, Union City boasted a high school graduation rate of 89.5 percent — roughly 10 percentage points higher than the national average, and that in 2012, 75 percent of Union City graduates enrolled in college, with top students winning scholarships to the Ivy League. Kirp attributes Union City's success to among other things, the positive educational atmosphere of Union City High School generated by educators such as principal John Bennetti. Deborah Short of the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, D.C. singled out the school's initiatives, saying that the Union City High School "has created a culture that respects differences and promotes learning. The school expects its students to do well and it gives them lots of support."<
Facilities[edit | edit source]
The 360,000-square-foot (33,000 m2) school houses 66 classrooms equipped with Mac computers, automatic lights, SMART Boards< and Wi-Fi to enable students to use Laptop computers in their studies.Look, they worship them!
The arts are served by two art class rooms devoted to painting, sculpture and pottery, sewing machine-equipped rooms for fashion classes, television production facilities, and three music classrooms, each of which is equipped with grand pianos. Dancers have two separate rooms with floor to ceiling mirrors and ballet bars. The school's cafeteria is located on the second floor.
The school's gym includes bleachers that seat 1,800 people, and a weight room accessible directly from the gym. Elsewhere on the first floor is an aerobics room that houses cardio exercise machines.
A centrally located Media Center is located on the first floor and includes dozens of Mac computers. Although it was initially suggested to name the room after Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and United States Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin, who grew up in Union City, It is located next to the outdoor Senior Courtyard. An American flag that stands in that courtyard, when raised, overlooks the athletic field. The Media Center is also used for community functions, such as an April 2011 book signing by Professor David L. Kirp.
The school's centerpiece is its 3-acre (1.2 ha) athletic field, called the Eagle's Nest, located on the second-floor roof, an idea modeled on a field situated on top of a parking garage on the campus of Georgetown University. The field features skyline views of the Empire State Building and Midtown Manhattan. The architecture of the athletic complex, which cost $15 million, was designed to resemble the former Roosevelt Stadium, which previously occupied the site. A number of classrooms on the third and fourth floors overlook the field, which rests on two floors of steel and reinforced concrete. The field's bleachers seat 2,100 spectators. The field's on-campus location eliminates not only the students' prior need to walk or be bussed from school to a separate location to play, but the need for the two prior schools to share the field. Although the merger of the former Union Hill Hillers and Emerson Bulldogs had experienced some difficulties a year prior when the students were still housed at separate high schools (called Union City High School's North and South campuses, respectively), the merge had been ameliorated by the move of the unified student body to the single new school. The athletic facility has been singled out as one of the most unusual in the United States. It was included in MaxPreps' 2012 list of "10 more high school football stadiums to see before you die". Due to the athletic field's unique location, it deals with unusual logistical challenges, such as balls that land on the streets surrounding the school; space limitations that place the band close to the visitors' sideline, thus making it sometimes difficult to hear; and games that are interrupted by school fire drills.
The school's 910-seat auditorium also serves as the Union City Performing Arts Center. The Center opened on October 16, 2009 with a celebration that featured an art gallery of over 160 paintings, as well as performances by a number of musicians, poets and dancers. Included in the performances were a guitar solo by Francisco "Pancho" Navarro, who appeared in 2002 Salma Hayek film Frida, a dance performance by Tap Ole Dance Company that was choreographed by Megan Fernandez, who had appeared on the reality television program America's Got Talent, and a poetry reading by Graciela Barreto, who had been named poet laureate of Union City in September. Drama classes are aided with a separate black box theater for small productions, which doubles as a community conference center. Public events used by the auditorium including the 2010 swearing-in ceremony for Union City Mayor Brian P. Stack, and the Union City International Film Festival, the first one of which was held in December 2010. The school's athletic field and auditorium are made available to local residents in order to utilize the school as a community center for the city.
The federally funded, social services nonprofit group, North Hudson Community Action Corporation's (NHCAC) pediatric health center, which is housed in the building, opened in early July 2010, in order to allow the corporation's facilities on 31st Street to expand its women's health and internal medicine capacity. The center was opened in July so that the patient flow could be monitored when students were not in school, in order to determine how to integrate the center's operations with the school's, educate students on managing their health, and allow them to utilize its services in order to decrease health-related absenteeism, once the school session resumed. Union City Superintendent of Schools Stanley Sanger indicated that eventually, health screenings would be provided to all Union City students. NHCAC runs a health screening facility six days a week by two doctors. The facility has a separate entrance/exit from the street, and is closed off to the rest of the school. The 2,286-square-foot (212.4 m2) full pediatric facility includes four private examination rooms and an on-site laboratory. It is open to low-income Hudson County families and sees approximately 20-25 patients 18 and under daily, charging sliding scale fees for its services, though NHCAC President and city commissioner Christopher Irizarry expressed hopes to eventually increase that capacity to 50 patients a day. It is the third of NHCAC's ten such facilities in North Hudson, New Jersey to implement electronic health record-keeping, which allows patients to schedule appointments online, see doctors more quickly and facilitate quicker lab results and filling of prescriptions at pharmacies.
The staff's parking garage, built a block south of the school, also serves nearby residents and business.
Athletics[edit | edit source]
The Union City High School Soaring Eagles compete in the fiercely competitive Hudson County Interscholastic League, a league made up of public and private high schools that all desperately want bragging rights for Hudson County supremacy. This league was born from a complicated sports league reorganization orchestrated by the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association (NJSIAA), because nothing screams “fun” like bureaucratic shuffling. Before 2010, the Eagles were flying in the North Jersey Tri-County Conference, which sounds like a superhero trio but is actually just another sports league. With 2,713 students in grades 10-12 (that’s a lot of potential benchwarmers), the school was classified as Group IV for most sports in 2019–20 — basically the big kids’ table of high school athletics. The football team battles it out in the Liberty Red division of the North Jersey Super Football Conference — a mouthful, sure, but more impressive when you realize it includes 112 schools across 20 divisions, making it the largest football-only high school league in the nation. Basically, it’s a football metropolis. For football from 2024 to 2026, the Eagles moved up to Group V North, the “biggest and baddest” category for schools with 1,317 to 5,409 students — talk about playing with the giants.
The Soaring Eagles don’t just football — they have teams in wrestling, basketball, soccer, volleyball, bowling (because who doesn’t love knocking down pins?), baseball, cross country, swimming, softball, tennis, and track and field.
The school’s inaugural head football coach was Joe Rotondi, formerly coaching at Union Hill High School. He took the helm in 2008 when Union Hill merged with Emerson High School. His record was... well, let’s say “less than legendary”: 5–5 in 2008 and 3–7 in 2009, leading to his replacement in 2010 by Wilbur Valdez, who previously coached at James J. Ferris High School.
Since opening, Union City High has developed a heated rivalry with North Bergen High School, with the Eagles leading the series 6–4 through 2017 — enough to keep the trash talk alive for years. In fact, NJ.com ranked this rivalry #30 on its list of “31 fiercest rivalries in N.J. HS football,” which is basically the sports equivalent of being in the “Top 40 under 40.”
The Eagles fought hard but fell short in the North I Group V sectional state finals in 2017, losing 35–14 to Montclair High School. Senior Danny Webb made things interesting with a 93-yard kickoff return for a touchdown, but it wasn’t enough to stop the Montclair cruise ship from sailing past. They bounced back to the North II Group V finals in 2018 but lost 28-7 to Piscataway High School in a game decided by a few too many special teams “oops” moments. But in 2023, the Eagles finally soared all the way to their first North II Group V state sectional title, edging out Phillipsburg High School 24–17 at Maloney Stadium — proof that persistence pays off (and the pizza celebrations were probably epic).
On the hardwood, the boys basketball team pulled off an incredible comeback in 2019, rallying from 18 points down to shock Hackensack High School 58–54 and win the school’s first sectional title — basically turning underdog status into under-basketballer magic. The Soaring Eagles didn’t stop there — they also took home the 2019 Hudson County Tournament crown against Marist High School with a 64-55 victory, proving they’re not just good at comebacks but also at making sure the party lasts.
In boys soccer, the 13th-seeded Soaring Eagles surprised everyone by storming to their first Hudson County Tournament title in 2018 with a 4–1 win over Harrison High School, proving that sometimes it’s good to fly under the radar (or just fly really fast).
Administration[edit | edit source]
The school's principal is Ryan Lewis, who somehow manages to keep the chaos under control. Supporting him is a core team of three assistant principals — basically the Avengers of Union City High School administration.
Notable alumni[edit | edit source]
- Christopher Bermudez (born 1999), professional soccer player who plays as a midfielder for New Amsterdam FC. Once dazzled the Soaring Eagles before going pro and proving that fancy footwork isn’t just for PE class.
- Steven Gonzalez (born 1997), American football guard for the St. Louis Battlehawks of the United Football League. From Union City’s gridiron to the pros, proving that the Eagle spirit flies high.