Shouting "education not gentrification" and holding signs that read "New Brunswick is not for sale," members of the Coalition to Defend Lincoln Annex School protested a proposed $750 million expansion of Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey that would claim the land on which the school sits.
MyCentralJersey.com reports that the protesters are demanding that, before the Cancer Pavilion breaks ground, a replacement school should be built for the school's 750 predominantly Latino fourth- to eighth-graders at the Lincoln Annex School.
At a meeting of Rutgers University's board of governors, nearly two dozen speakers spoke about the plans for the Cancer Institute
"RWJBarnabas Health’s proposal to build a 510,000-square foot hospital facility in New Brunswick to provide expanded clinical space requires the approvals of New Brunswick city governing boards and the New Brunswick Board of Education for the purchase of the Lincoln School Annex and construction of a new school to replace it," the university said in a statement.
"While Rutgers is not the project developer, the university fully supports an outcome that will address the educational needs of families in our community by providing them with a state-of-the-art elementary school as quickly as possible and with as little disruption as possible, and an outcome that provides the community with high-quality clinical care the hospital expansion will bring to New Brunswick, New Jersey and beyond."
Many speakers complained that the site the city has proposed for a replacement school is contaminated.
"As much as Rutgers tries to distance itself from this decision-making and say it’s up to the hospital or the city, Rutgers already signed onto this project when it sold the 'Rutgers Health' brand for $100 million to RWJBarnabas Health in 2018," says Lilia Fernandez, a Rutgers professor of Latin & Caribbean Studies and a leader of the protesters.
"This project will cause tremendous hardship, displacing and disrupting children and their families,” she added. "As an urban historian who studies these issues on behalf of the university, I’ve seen repeated examples of powerful institutions dislocating hard-working people, making their lives more difficult. For what? For greater profits? For development dollars? For the ambitions of city leaders and hospital executives to expand their market share of the Central New Jersey cancer industry?
State statistics show that 94% of Lincoln Annex students are Latino and 86% economically disadvantaged
