Published: March 1, 1995

Lives In The Balance

The Trenton, N.J., school district is something of a giant funnel: Eighteen elementary schools feed into four middle schools that pour into one monolithic structure on Chambers Street known as Trenton Central High School.

The majority of students who enter this funnel spill out along the way. Consider this year's class enrollments at Trenton Central: 1,025 freshmen, 677 sophomores, 489 juniors, and 446 seniors.

As community leaders see it, that means only four out of 10 of the district's 12,600 public school students will graduate from high school. Only half of those, two out of 10, will go on to college, they say. The district argues that those figures are an exaggeration. But by anyone's count,...