New Jersey's best towns for families: Is your town on the list?

Montgomery Township is the sort of idyllic suburb that reminds you that New Jersey is called the Garden State for a reason.

"We're on the fringe of being rural; there's a quaintness to that," says the local schools superintendent, Nancy Gartenberg. "I can walk out my office and see farms."

Blessed with top-notch schools, scenic open spaces as well as abundant restaurant and shopping offerings, the 32-square-mile Somerset County community of 23,500 people is a "special place," Gartenberg says, even if "people are not always exactly sure where it is" (just outside Princeton.)

New Jersey Family magazine agrees. Its April issue names Montgomery the state's best town for families. After you check out the photo gallery above of families enjoying Saddle River County Park in Glen Rock (No. 2 on the list), take a look at the list of the other municipalities rounding out the Top 10, along with their populations:

2. Glen Rock (Bergen), 12,045

3. Bedminster (Somerset), 8,210

4. Mendham Township (Morris), 5,845 (Check out Mendham's Labor Day Parade in the video below, in which Bob and Helen Cleary became the first husband and wife to serve as the co-grand marshals of the annual commemoration.)

5. Bernards Township (Somerset), 27,061

6. West Windsor (Mercer), 28,491

7. North Caldwell (Essex), 6,730

8. Raritan Township (Hunterdon), 22,106

9. Clinton Township (Hunterdon), 12,907

10. Union Township (Union), 5,543

See more North Jersey towns:See how your North Jersey town ranks when it comes to raising a family

What about Central Jersey?: Did yours make the list?

Monmouth County?: How did your town rank?

Ocean County?: Where does yours rank?

This is the New Jersey Family's first statewide ranking of the most family-friendly towns since 2017, when Clinton Township claimed the top spot, and its fourth overall. The other prior winners were Oradell, Bergen County (2016) and Pennington, Mercer County (2015.)

Dina El Nabli, editorial director of the Summit-based magazine, said the rankings are based on an algorithm that crunches a wealth of data on housing, school, crime, taxes and demographic diversity for the 512 New Jersey towns with more than 1,500 residents. The analysis excludes smaller municipalities due to a lack of available data.

It takes El Nabli's small staff about six months to compile all the information and check it for accuracy, which is why the magazine decided to switch from annual to biennial rankings.

"It's a huge undertaking," El Nabli said. 

El Nabli said the criteria has evolved over the years. This year, for example, the magazine looked at household income, average home prices and tax rates "to see how affordable the town is for the people who actually live there."

Similarly, the school performance index has been updated to incorporate an assessment of each district's art offerings, in addition to such usual measures as SAT scores and the percentage of students taking Advanced Placement tests, El Nabli noted. You can read a full description of the criteria and the magazine's data sources here.

"Every time we do this we think about our method and try to take a fresh approach," El Nabli said.

Having said that, El Nabli concedes there's no way to measure how charming, welcoming or wonderful a town is. Her own community of Ridgewood, Bergen County —which El Nabli happens to think the world of — didn't crack the top 100 list this year, she noted

"We get a big response every time we do this, because it really strikes a chord with people," El Nabli said.

"They're either really excited or disappointed," she said. "They want to know, 'Why isn't my town on the list?'"

Shannon Mullen: @MullenAPP; shannon@app.com; 732-643-4278