Bergen County Weighs Moving Programs to Juvenile Detention Center Site

Two of the programs the Bergen County Special Services School District runs at its Rockleigh campus could be coming to the site of the Bergen County juvenile detention center inParamus, officials say.

The district and the county are in talks to move the New Bridges program for high school students with autism and a rehabilitation program for adults to East Ridgewood Avenue.

Many of the district's programs are already at the its main campus in Paramus. Consolidating the autistic programs will be less disruptive for the students, who are sensitive to change, Ed Trawinski, Bergen County administrator, said.

Currently, when students finish the lower grades of the autism program, they have to relocate to Rockleigh to take high-school-level classes. The New Bridges program will be literally across the street in Paramus, Trawinski said.

This will lessen the burden for parents with students in both the lower grades and the high school programs, he added.

Administrating the programs should also be easier when they are closer, Howard Lerner, superintendent of the Special Services school district, said.

The move should represent a savings for most local school districts, Trawinski said. Districts have to pay to transport their students to the Rockleigh campus.

That cost should be mitigated after the programs move to more centrally located Paramus, he said.

"There will be a few surrounding Rockleigh that will incur slightly more costs, but when you look at all the costs together, it will be a cost savings," Trawinski said.

The change won't impact the Paramus school district, Steven Cea, business administrator for Paramus schools, said. Paramus doesn't send any students to Rockleigh.

A little more than 200 students would be affected by the sale of the Rockleigh land, which would involve relocating all the Special Services programs run there.

The New Bridges and the adult rehabilitation program would move to land Bergen County already owns: the former site of the county juvenile detention center. The center still stands and will likely be demolished as part of the move, Trawinski said.

"What I'm told is that a number of folks have already looked at it on a preliminary basis and said the cost of taking that and retrofitting it would outweigh the cost of demolishing it and rebuilding it," he said.

The center has been out of use for more than a year. The handful of juveniles that were housed there have been relocated to Union County.

They will be moving to a newly built center in Teterboro that the state required the county to build, Trawinski said.

Paramus Mayor Richard LaBarbiera said he was concerned about the growing trend of county programs moving to Paramus. If the Rockleigh programs move to the Borough, they will join a new county  and the county Police Department as future Paramus residents.

"Yes it is their property and they can do as they see fit, however, I'm concerned about the potential negative impact resulting from the additional traffic," LaBarbiera said.

Trawinski has set an "optimistic" goal of September 2013 to complete the sale of the Rockleigh property and to have the programs in place in Paramus.

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