21st Century Learning

Modern classrooms with tables and stations, Chromebooks in each child’s hand, textbooks on-line, electronic music created in labs, robots coming down the hallways, visual display screens with events schedules, classroom instruction built on universal design and differentiation based on learning styles, students redesigning spaces in virtual reality in a design class and getting approval from the board members to go ahead with the project … these are all signs that your child’s education is going to be remarkably different from yours.  In the last two years this model has been fully embraced in Vernon Township schools!

The classrooms are set up on the workshop model, lessons are taught with independent station work reinforcing the lesson, lessons are being flipped in video creations, students are becoming project engineers of their own leaning as we pursue the goal of actively engaging the “mouse click” generation.  Clubs and activities are offered after school to further not only the school day learning but to engage our students’ inborn passions allowing them the facility to see where their education can lead them.  All of this is part of a significant shift designed to reach a new generation of digital natives where they are and in doing so guide them to where we need them to be to be the successful, sophisticated global citizens that the world will be expecting in just a few short years.

Athletics

Vernon Township School District offers 30 varsity sports encompassing 49 levels. Vernon competes in the Northwest Jersey Athletic Conference (NJAC) and the Hunterdon Warren Sussex League (HWS) along with sport specific leagues in ice hockey, skiing, in-door track and field, volleyball and lacrosse. The ideal of sportsmanship permeates every aspect of our culture. The ethic of fair play and respect of an opponent is fundamental. Athletics as we know it are a training ground for good citizenship and high behavioral standards. Vernon Township High School, the N.J.A.C. and the N.J.S.I.A.A. are all committed to fair play, graciousness toward an opponent, and a genuine concern and respect for others.

Arts

For the past several decades the name Vernon has been synonymous with Arts excellence. For each of the past six years our district has been recognized by the NAMM Foundation as a “Best Community in Music Education” placing out schools among the top 3% nation-wide for music education. Annually our visual art students win countless awards and scholarships and ou drama students have brought home some of the state’s highest awards over the past several years including top honors at the STANJ Festival, Thespian Festival, and through Paper Mill Playhouse’s Rising Star program. Each year, our entire arts programs come together for Artstanding, which is a PK-12 Arts Festival. It is the towns’s largest annual event and has had nearly 10,000 attendees since it first began only a few years ago.

STEAM

Our departments have made tremendous strides recently toward adopting STEAM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) as a way of life. Project Lead the Way (PLTW) is an exemplar nationally recognized curriculum in STEAM and Glen Meadow now boast a “PLTW Gateway Program.” VTHS has two PLTW programs, offering seven classes between Engineering and Computer Science, Robotics, Coding and STEAM-related initiatives begin as early as PreK and continue throughout a child’s entire VTSD career. Even art and music have adopted STEAM principals with the advent of the Music Production CTE program and Graphic Design CTE program. For more on our efforts to infuse technology, design, and college/ career readiness into our curricular programs, see the CTE link at the bottom of the page.

Activities

In the Vernon schools, students have many exciting and diverse opportunists as they pertain to after school clubs and activities. These include clubs ranging from archery, robotics, volunteer activities, entrepreneurship, jazz bands, musicals, coding, art, graphic design and aeronautics. It has indeed been a district wide initiative to offer more inclusive clubs and activities to students that represent places that they want to inhabit. And while the new clubs in Glen Meadow, Lounsberry, and VTHS reflect a modern, technology bent, the general feel on our campuses is that if you want a club or activity a staff member will be there to support you and try to make it happen!

VTHS Boasts 9 Career and Technical Programs

There is a lot that we are excited to share with opportunities in high demand fields that prepare students for college and careers.

Find out more