JAMESBURG New facility will call old Borough Hall home
By: Al Wicklund
JAMESBURG The Little Wonders Day School is scheduled to open in September on East Railroad Avenue in the building that formerly housed Jamesburg’s Borough Hall, the school’s director said this week.
The private day school, for children 18 months to 6 years of age, gained the approval of the Land Use Board April 11.
Letizia Nagy, the director and owner of the new facility, said she is pleased to have the board’s authorization and to be able to proceed with getting the building ready for the fall.
Ms. Nagy said plans are to have the day school open from 7 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.
She said there also will be a summer program.
"We’re planning to have four classrooms and an enrollment of 49 students. All of our teachers will be state certified," the school director said.
In getting approval of the borough’s Land Use Board, Ms. Nagy and her husband, Peter, made adjustments to meet the board’s concerns for traffic safety.
The owners of the building and their engineer met with borough officials in advance of the board’s April 11 meeting to deal with the board’s concerns.
Ms. Nagy said they changed the building’s main entrance from the front, on East Railroad Avenue, to the rear of the school
Bernie Long, the borough’s zoning officer, said safety was the priority for all involved.
Mr. Long said the board believed that the main entrance would be safer if it were in the rear of the building.
Mr. Long had said board members said they believed a rear entrance would be safer than an entrance in the front of the building, which would have forced parents to take extra time to walk their children to the front door and then walk back the parking area at the rear of the building.
He said board members thought the extra time for the walk to the front of the building could contribute to overcrowding in the parking lot and possible congestion in neighboring streets.
The Nagys had agreed at previous meetings to the board’s requests for landscaping around the outside of the building, an upgrade in fencing and a change to provide for storage of garbage indoors rather using a Dumpster in the parking lot.