Brick Township High School is a four-year public high school serving students in ninth through twelfth grades in Brick Township in Ocean County, New Jersey, operating as part of the Brick Public Schools. The school is one of two secondary schools in the district, the other being Brick Memorial High School.
As of the 2021–22 school year, the school had an enrollment of 1,256 students and 96.8 classroom teachers (on an FTE basis), for a student–teacher ratio of 13.0:1. There were 327 students (26.0% of enrollment) eligible for free lunch and 99 (7.9% of students) eligible for reduced-cost lunch.
History
Students from Brick Township had attended Point Pleasant Beach High School for grades 9-12 as part of a sending/receiving relationship, though capacity issues in Point Pleasant Beach meant that Brick would send half of its students to Central Regional High School starting in 1956. By the 1958-59 school year, neither school would be able to accommodate students from Brick due to overcrowding.
Constructed at a cost of $1.6 million (equivalent to $ million in ), and designed to handle from 868 to a maximum enrollment of 1,086, the school opened in September 1958 with 1,000 students in grades 7-12.
The school underwent a $5.7 million project in 2015 that replaced the original boilers and ventilators, and added air conditioning to the school for the first time.
Brick Memorial High School opened in September 1980 as the district's second high school, by sharing the building of Brick Township High School, with separate morning and afternoon sessions for the two schools. The building, constructed at a cost of $11.4 million, opened in January 1981 for more than 1,000 students in grades 9 to 11.
Awards, recognition and rankings
The school was the 206th-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 261st in the state of 328 schools in 2012, after being ranked 248th in 2010 out of 322 schools listed. The magazine ranked the school 251st in 2008 out of 316 schools. The school was ranked 251st in the magazine's September 2006 issue, which surveyed 316 schools across the state.
Schooldigger.com ranked the school 208th out of 415 public high schools statewide in its 2018 rankings (an improvement of 36 positions from the 2017 rank) which were based on the combined percentage of students classified as proficient or above proficient on the language arts literacy and mathematics components of the High School Proficiency Assessment (HSPA).
Athletics
The Brick Township High School Green Dragons compete in Division A South of the Shore Conference, an athletic conference comprised of public and private high schools in Monmouth and Ocean counties along the Jersey Shore. The league operates under the jurisdiction of the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association (NJSIAA). With 951 students in grades 10-12, the school was classified by the NJSIAA for the 2019–20 school year as Group III for most athletic competition purposes, which included schools with an enrollment of 761 to 1,058 students in that grade range. The school was classified by the NJSIAA as Group IV South for football for 2022–2024, which included schools with 893 to 1,296 students. BTHS's mascot is a green dragon.
Interscholastic sports programs offered at Brick Township include baseball, basketball, bowling, cheering, cross country, field hockey, football, golf, gymnastics, ice hockey, indoor track, lacrosse, soccer, softball, swimming, table tennis, tennis, track, volleyball and wrestling.
Brick Township won the boys Group II cross country state championships in 1959 and won the Group III titles in 1964-1967. The school's Russ Taintor was the individual champion in Group III in 1965, 1966 and 1967, making him the second of eight boys cross country runners in New Jersey to win three individual state championships. He also won three consecutive one mile outdoor state championships and added two indoor two mile championships for a total of eight individual state titles.