North Brunswick had sent students to New Brunswick High School until it completed a high school of its own in 1973 that was constructed at a cost of $10 million and that had been opened to the district's students in grades seven through nine. The New Brunswick Public Schools sought to prevent the shift of 280 students who would have attended high school in New Brunswick from attending the new facility, arguing that the withdrawal of the almost entirely white students from North Brunswick and Milltown would leave the New Brunswick school with an overwhelmingly black student body.