Leonia High School is a four-year comprehensive public high school serving students in ninth through twelfth grade from the Borough of Leonia in Bergen County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey, operating as part of the Leonia Public Schools. Students from Edgewater attend the school as part of a sending/receiving relationship with the Edgewater Public Schools.Leonia Public Schools 2015 School Report Card Narrative, New Jersey Department of Education. Accessed May 29, 2016. "The high school continues to increase in numbers as now approximately 725 students from both Edgewater and Leonia are enrolled in grades 9-12 at Leonia High School."Leonia Schools at a glance , Leonia Public Schools. Accessed May 29, 2016. "Enrollment is 1835. Of this, 380 are Edgewater students in grades 7-12."
As of the 2024–25 school year, the school had an enrollment of 802 students and 62.4 classroom teachers (on an FTE basis), for a student–teacher ratio of 12.9:1. There were 193 students (24.1% of enrollment) eligible for free lunch and 36 (4.5% of students) eligible for reduced-cost lunch.School data for Leonia High School, National Center for Education Statistics. Accessed January 15, 2026.
Leonia High School was begun in 1912, when the borough became one of relatively few municipalities in Bergen County to have a high school. During its early years, the school attracted students from seven other school districts in the area, who attended on a tuition basis. The original school building was opened in 1913; expansions to the physical plant were made in 1917, 1937, 1946, and 1963. The school was experiencing severe overcrowding by the 1970s, and after two boroughwide referendums to build a new school failed, a third was passed. The present Leonia High School building was opened in 1977, with the original building being repurposed as Leonia Middle School.
History Founding and opening
By the early 20th century, Leonia was growing with the construction of new homes, many of them built by the Leonia Heights Land Company, which advertised Leonia as "the Athens of New Jersey" due in part to its convenient location to Columbia University. During 1912, the Leonia Board of Education approved the creation of a high school, and in April of that year, the town approved a $65,000 bond issue (equal to $ million in ) to buy a plot of land and build the district's original high school facility on it. The land had previously been a farm. Leonia High School was established in 1912, with students attending classes in the borough's elementary school at first before a separate high school building was completed.Leonia High School Archive Record, Leonia Public Library. Accessed April 12, 2022. "Flyer announcing the opening of the new Leonia High School (April 1912), brochure describing new Leonia High School with faculty photos (1913), Copy of 1912 newspaper clipping from the New York Times stating that $65,000 bond issue for new school."
The new building had its cornerstone laid at ceremonies held in December 1912;"Leonia High School Cornerstone Was Laid", The Evening Record, December 9, 1912. Accessed April 12, 2022, via Newspapers.com. "On Saturday afternoon, at 3 o'clock, the cornerstone of the new $65,000 High school at Leonia was laid with appropriate ceremonies." it was completed in April 1913, with a facade oriented towards Christie Heights Street near Broad Avenue. By May 1913, Leonia High School was fielding a team for baseball in interscholastic competition.See for instance The new high school opened in September 1913 and had modern facilities for that era. A formal dedication ceremony for the new school was held on October 17, 1913. Leonia became one of only about a dozen municipalities in all of Bergen County with their own high schools.
Early years In this era, continuing on to secondary school was not legally required and many children instead entered the workforce. In order for the high school to have a solid enough financial basis, pupils from several nearby communities in Bergen County were invited to attend it on a tuition-paying basis. (The tuition would typically be paid for by the sending town, not the parents of the pupils involved.) A trolley line ran along Broad Avenue at the time and this enabled students from outside Leonia to reach the high school in a convenient manner. In all, there were seven school districts sending high school pupils to Leonia on a tuition basis. Of the initial student population at the high school of 73 students, only 23 were from Leonia.
Bogota was one of those initial municipalities that sent students; by 1915, there were 46 Bogota students attending Leonia High School. Maywood was another early town, although the relationship ended in the early 1920s. Palisades Park was sending students to Leonia as of at least the 1920s and 1930s, while Ridgefield was sending as of at least the early 1930s. And for a while in the 1930s, Edgewater students attended Leonia High School on a tuition basis. These relationships could change over time, as towns switched arrangements or built their own high schools. Other towns that sent students to Leonia High School at some point were Fort Lee and Teaneck.
Enrollment in the school increased rapidly; indeed, the town's population, which had about doubled between 1900 and 1910, doubled again by 1920. An addition was built onto the east side of the school in 1917, that featured a larger facade which was oriented directly onto Broad Avenue. Land immediately adjacent to the school was acquired for a football field in 1926 and dedicated in 1928. Another addition, this time onto the west side of the school, was built in 1937, and included a lunchroom; this new wing was a product of one or both of the New Deal agencies, the Public Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration.
Post-war era In 1945, the Board of Education proposed the addition of a new gymnasium that would cost $275,000 (equivalent to $ million in ) and would be made available to town residents for outside recreation activities. (The Board sought public support for the project by describing it as a war memorial that would be of "practical benefit" to veterans and their families.) Construction was begun in 1946, and continued into 1947 before being completed.
Following the 1957–58 school year, Palisades Park and Ridgefield stopped sending students to Leonia High School. Palisades Park decided to send its students to Cliffside Park High School and Ridgefield was in the process of building Ridgefield Memorial High School. As part of replacing the tuition income from these two towns, Leonia High School began receiving students from Edgewater again in 1958, a relationship that continues to this day. (Edgewater had been sending its students to Dwight Morrow High School in Englewood.) In an opposite flow, some Leonia students also went at least part time to Bergen County Vocational-Technical High School.
An expansion and modernization program costing $335,000 (equivalent to $ million in ) was approved by a wide margin in a borough referendum in 1961. Completed in 1963, the expansion consisted of a new wing on the southeast corner, one that housed the enlarged school library and several classrooms.
Overcrowding and referendums During these years, Leonia had no middle school; the Anna C. Scott Elementary School served grades K through 7, after which, in a transition that the school system itself characterized as "abrupt", students would move to the high school for grades 8 through 12. Additional students arrived at the high school in grade 9, where they came from St. John the Evangelist School in Leonia, a Catholic school which for many years taught K through 8. Then more students arrived in grade 10, the grade at which Edgewater sending began its sending in that era.
By the mid-1960s, it was clear that the physical plant of Leonia High School was no longer adequate, and the 1965 report of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools put the board on notice accordingly by giving it a provisional three-year accreditation in place of the usual five years. There were many problems: the shared, cramped student lockers; a small auditorium; inadequate laboratory space for sciences; and useless time being spent in study halls. The music room could only hold half the school band at any given time. Nevertheless, efforts to improve the level of academics carried on; from the early days, the faculty of Leonia High School often had connections to Teachers College at Columbia University, and the district was part of the Columbia University Teacher's College Metropolitan School Study Council, which provided the faculty with various research materials. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a collaboration with Columbia resulted in the advanced, experimental Secondary School Mathematics Curriculum Improvement Study series of math courses being taught at the school.
Leonia was known for the artists and intellectuals who lived there, and while there were indeed some Columbia University professors who were residents, there were not as many as some people imagined; plenty of other kinds of people lived in the town, especially from the 1940s on. In particular, fully one-eighth of the population were senior citizens on fixed incomes. From the 1940s on, referendums for building proposals in the borough had a history of often not passing.
School administrators explored alternative ideas to relieve Leonia's overcrowding, in particular joining another town and becoming a regional school district. Feelers were put out to a number of surrounding towns during 1968, and discussions with one, Bogota, encompassing full K–12 regionalization, became quite serious and were the subject of assessment reports and public meetings. But the Bogota proposal would require new building too, and by 1970 the Leonia board had dropped the idea.
The overcrowding situation grew critical; in 1971, the third floor of the school was condemned as unsafe for instructional use. In one publicized case, a windowless, poorly ventilated room in the basement, with student desks crammed together, was being used daily for five classes in mathematics and other subjects. Whereas the school had only been designed for 500 pupils, by 1972 there were over 800 students coming to it.
In June 1972, a $5.1 million (equivalent to $ million in ) bond referendum to build a new high school was put up for a boroughwide vote, but it went down to a narrow defeat. Undeterred, the Board of Education put the exact same proposal up for another vote in September 1972, hoping to sway enough minds to get approval. But it went down to defeat again, this time by a more substantial margin.
After surveying voter wishes, the Board of Education revised its proposal for a new high school, producing one with a lower cost figure of $4 million (equivalent to $ million in ). This encountered some opposition from unexpected directions: progressive citizens and sitting and former board members who feared a new school would subsume the nascent, offsite Leonia Alternative High School, or who favored a less traditional approach to school buildings. Also threatening to oppose the referendum were sixth- and seventh-grade parents in the grade school who were unhappy with the school system's short-term handling of overcrowding there following an August 1974 fire that destroyed a wing of that facility. By then, many Bergen County municipalities were rejecting referendums designed to overhaul or replace aging infrastructure, with inflation of that era being an overriding economic concern. Nonetheless, put up for a vote in October 1974, the referendum passed, a result that The Record called "all the more surprising following bitter dissension this fall among a number of factions involved in the school issue."
New building