The Toms River Regional School District is one of 17 public school districts chosen to take part in the NJ Department of Education's innovateNJ community for the 2015-16 school year.

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The program is designed to encourage schools to develop and share best classroom practices statewide.  Toms River Regional Assistant Superintendent of Operations Dr. Marc Natanagara says the district was actually asked to apply.

"We had some practices that we though the way we designed them are duplicable," Natanagara said.  "So, we're creating maker spaces as one example, we're integrating more technology into the classroom to meet the new tech, the new next-generation science standards."

Dr. Natanagara says he's most excited about ways to integrate classroom education in secondary schools the way it it is in elementary.

"They'll learn about something in science, but they see how it relates in social studies to the history of that, they can write about it in their English class and read about it, and maybe do some mathematical models of it in math and maybe do some design pieces in art," Natanagara said.

 

Toms River Regional is partnered with the A. Harry Moore School in Jersey City.  Dr. Natanagara says the innovateNJ model involves partnering schools that seem like opposites, to find ways to make the same protocols work on different scales.

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