Bridgewater Schools Among Safest in State, New Report Shows

Bridgewater-Raritan Regional schools are far from being among the state's most violent districts, and are even quite safe compared to other Somerset County districts, according to the latest Violence and Vandalism in Schools report issued by the state.

In fact, even when compared only to Somerset County's larger districts, Bridgewater stacks up well in almost all areas.

The report totals incidents of violence, vandalism, weapons, substance abuse and violations of the new Harassment, Intimidation and Bullying Law for districts in New Jersey. For the 2012-13 report issued Thursday, BRRSD reported 21 incidents of violence, 11 incidents of vandalism and none involving weapons, just seven substance abuse incidents, and 37 HIB cases for a total of 76 incident reports. 

When looked at as percentages of the totals for Somerset County, Bridgewater-Raritan schools fare very well in the incidents of violence (with 16 percent of the total student population, the district had 8 percent of the violence reports), vandalism (4.28 percent of the county total) and substance abuse (6.48 percent).

When compared only to other township and larger districts in the county*, the district's share of reports for all of the reports were below its percentage of the student population—with 18.24 of the student population, the district's figures total 15.3 percent of the county's comparable district's total.

*Methodology: The state report tallies school districts by county, so to get a better comparison, we deducted the figures for smaller and specialized districts. That left Bridgewater in comparison with schools in Bedminster, Bernards, Branchburg, Franklin, Green Book, Hillsborough, Montgomery, North Plainfield, Somerset Hills, Warren and Watchung Hills Regional. Not included were Bound Brook, South Bound Brook, Manville, Somerset County Educational Services, Somerset County Vo-Tech, Somerville and Watchung Borough.