Union City High School - Facilities

Facilities

The 360,000-square-foot (33,000 m2) school houses 66 high-tech classrooms equipped with Mac computers, automatic lights, SMART Boards and Wi-Fi to enable students to use laptop computers in their studies.

The school features a number of science labs. The arts are served by two art class rooms devoted to painting, sculpture and pottery, sewing machine-equipped rooms for fashion classes, television production facilities, and three music classrooms, each of which is equipped with grand pianos. Dancers have two separate rooms with floor to ceiling mirrors and ballet bars. The school's second floor cafeteria requires a private firm to operate the cooking equipment, including several walk-in freezers and a half-dozen pizza ovens. The school's restrooms utilize automated no-touch sinks.

The school's "world-class" gym includes bleachers that seat 1,800 people, and a weight room accessible directly from the gym. Elsewhere on the first floor is an aerobics room that houses cardio exercise machines.

A centrally located, modern computerized library called the Media Center, is located on the first floor. Although it was initially suggested to name the room after Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and United States Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin, who grew up in Union City, it was eventually named after former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey. It is located next to the outdoor Senior Courtyard. An American flag that stands in that courtyard, when raised, overlooks the athletic field. The Media Center is also used for community functions, such as an April 2011 book signing by Professor David L. Kirp.

The school's centerpiece is its three-acre athletic field, called the Eagle's Nest, located on the second floor roof, which features skyline views of the Empire State Building and Midtown Manhattan. The architecture of the athletic complex, which cost $15 million, was designed to resemble the former Roosevelt Stadium, which previously occupied the site. A number of classrooms on the third and fourth floors overlook the field, which rests on two floors of steel and reinforced concrete. The field's bleachers seat 2,100 spectators. The field's on-campus location eliminates not only the students' prior need to walk or be bussed from school to a separate location to play, but the need for the two prior schools to share the field. Although the merger of the former Union Hill Hillers and Emerson Bulldogs had experienced some difficulties a year prior when the students were still housed at separate high schools (called Union City High School's North and South campuses, respectively), the merge had been ameliorated by the move of the unified student body to the single new school. Hudson Reporter columnist Jim Hague opined that the athletic facility is perhaps the most unique in the state.

The school's 910-seat auditorium also serves as the Union City Performing Arts Center. The Center opened on October 16, 2009 with a celebration that featured an art gallery of over 160 paintings, as well as performances by a number of musicians, poets and dancers. Included in the performances were a guitar solo by Francisco "Pancho" Navarro, who appeared in 2002 Salma Hayek film Frida, a dance performance by Tap Ole Dance Company that was choreographed by Megan Fernandez, who had appeared on the reality television program America's Got Talent, and a poetry reading by Graciela Barreto, who had been named poet laureate of Union City in September. Drama classes are aided with a separate black box theater for small productions, which doubles as a community conference center. Public events used by the auditorium including the 2010 swearing-in ceremony for Union City Mayor Brian P. Stack, and the Union City International Film Festival, the first one of which was held in December 2010.

The school's athletic field and auditorium are made available to local residents in order to utilize the school as a community center for the city. Similarly, the North Hudson Community Action Corporation, a social services nonprofit group, runs a health screening facility six days a week by two doctors. The facility has a separate entrance/exit from the street, and is closed off to the rest of the school. The state-of-the-art 2,286-square-foot (212.4 m2) facility, which expanded in July 2010 into a full pediatric facility, includes four private examination rooms and an on-site laboratory. It is open to low-income Hudson County families and sees approximately 20-25 patients 18 and under daily, charging sliding-scale fees for its services, though NHCAC President and city commissioner Christopher Irizarry expressed hopes to eventually increase that capacity to 50 patients a day. It is the third of NHCAC's ten such facilities in North Hudson, New Jersey to implement electronic health record-keeping, which allows patients to schedule appointments online, see doctors more quickly and facilitate quicker lab results and filling of prescriptions at pharmacies.

The staff's parking garage, built a block south of the school, also serves nearby residents and business.