By Sunayana Prabhu
MIDDLETOWN – The township has approved Monmouth County’s proposal to acquire Port Monmouth Elementary School for $2.5 million. Last year, the Monmouth County Park System (MCPS) conducted surveys to evaluate the potential use of the shuttered school property as an indoor aquatic center.
Frank Capone, president of the Middletown Township School District Board of Education (BOE), confirmed Feb. 6 that the board authorized submitting the sale to the New Jersey Department of Education (NJDOE) for approval.
Township and county officials have been looking to repurpose the 94-year-old Port Monmouth Elementary School building that has been vacant since a Middletown BOE vote in March 2020 shuttered the school because of declining enrollment and inadequate state aid to sustain its operations. The building’s maintenance alone was expected to cost over $3.7 million.
The Middletown Township Committee and the BOE have previously attempted to repurpose the two-story, nearly 25,750-square-foot building with a partial basement. In 2022, the township contracted with Louisville, Kentucky, firm Pinnacle Indoor Sports to conduct a feasibility study to determine if the property could be used as an indoor sports and recreation center for the community.
More recently, the school was used as a film production facility, leased for two months in the summer of 2022 to Rumson resident George Kolber’s Navesink River Productions for the feature film “Miranda’s Victim,” released in 2023.
The location of the former school at the intersection of Route 36 and Main Street in Middletown’s northeast section of Port Monmouth “would allow us to serve many of the communities in the region from Keyport to Middletown to Highlands,” MCPS director Andrew Spears told The Two River Times during an interview in November. He further noted that the Route 36 corridor “is one of the more densely populated portions of the county, and we believe that there are a lot of families that would really benefit from aquatic programming.”
MCPS officials have been evaluating the feasibility of an aquatic center, analyzing potential cost estimates for construction and operations. MCPS has been running an online public survey through its Facebook page since November and is still accepting resident feedback on the need for a facility for fitness, recreation, competition or other aquatic programs in the community.
The article originally appeared in the February 8 –14, 2024 print edition of The Two River Times.
