Guest Column
Kevin Coyne
Pride in Freehold is centuries deep

The people protesting the redistricting of our regional high school system have been twisting and turning to avoid saying what everybody here in Freehold Borough knows is the real reason for their objection: They don’t want their kids to go to school with blacks, Hispanics and other people who aren’t like them.

What they are saying, in words that are becoming all too plain, is that they are better than us, that their children are too good to go to school with ours. In their us-versus-them equation, we are the inferior party, the ones to be avoided.

But what they would be surprised to learn, I think, is that we — those of us who were born here, who will die here, who have ties to this place deeper than anything they will ever understand — have an us-versus-them equation, too, and they don’t rate too highly in it.

Western Monmouth County has been altered so drastically by development over the last three decades that people often move here with the impression that it was all created just for them, that there was nobody here before they deigned to grace us with their presence. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Freehold is one of New Jersey’s original colonial settlements, and has been variously over three centuries a prosperous county seat, a farm trade center and a manufacturing town. Its high school, proudly integrated since the 1910s, has been sending graduates to college since long before any of the other schools in the district were dreamed of.

We here in Freehold have always known what a community is, and we have long understood the value of knowing people different from ourselves.

We are the kind of rare town that mixes an urban diversity with a village intimacy. We go to each other’s wakes and weddings; we stop and speak to each other when we walk downtown. We have a richness and texture to our lives that no treeless subdivision could ever match.

And when the surrounding farmland began filling with houses in the 1960s, and we saw that we would soon need a hospital of our own, we built one — entirely with money raised from the community.

What is now called Centra-State Medical Center was built in the same regional community spirit that built the Freehold Regional High School District — which has been so effectively educating our children for almost half a century now, and which produced one of America’s most important artists, Bruce Spring-steen. If our high school isn’t good enough for you, then maybe our hospital isn’t either.

Whenever I hear an attack on Freehold Borough High School, I get mad, of course, but then the anger turns to sadness — that those making the attacks don’t understand what they’re attacking; and that such sentiments are not only still abroad in America, but are in such close proximity to the town where six generations of my family are buried, the town I so dearly love.

The attackers and their children, as we all know here in Freehold Borough, have more to learn from us than we do from them.

Kevin Coyne is a resident of Freehold Borough. He is a member of the Borough Council.