Trending
By RICK STEELHAMMER, Charleston Gazette-Mail undefined
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) -- Plans are underway to transform the former Navy Information Operations Command base at Sugar Grove in Pendleton County into a residential community and therapeutic training center for children and young adults on the autism spectrum.
Legacy by Gersh, which operates 13 boarding schools, camps and training centers in New York, New Hampshire, Washington and Puerto Rico serving those on the autism spectrum, has leased the 123-acre site. It had been vacant since 2015.
“We’re going through the licensing process now,” company founder and CEO Kevin Gersh said recently in a phone interview. “We’ve met with the governor, the economic development office, the Education Department and other cabinet members and everyone has been very cooperative.”
Gersh said Dr. Jeffrey Shrewsbury, former director of the Southern Highlands Community Mental Health Center in Princeton, has been hired to administer the Sugar Grove campus. Legacy by Gersh is advertising to hire a pair of maintenance workers and an office manager to begin readying the site for its first residents, with the hiring of initial medical, therapeutic and educational personnel to follow.
“We hope to have the first children on site by September, COVID willing,” Gersh said. “We’re very excited about opening the campus at Sugar Grove.”
The former U.S. Navy installation was decommissioned Sept. 30, 2015, and sold for $4 million by the General Services Administration during an online auction in December 2016. Due to its remote location, the base included a nearly self-contained residential community with 90 single-family homes for married personnel and a three-story dormitory-style barracks that housed more than 100 single enlisted sailors.
The base also contains a commissary, restaurant-equipped community center, fire department, bowling alley, dining hall, swimming pool, lighted baseball field, office buildings, shops for art and craft hobbyists, tennis courts and direct fishing access to the South Fork of the South Branch of the Potomac.
Mellivora Capital Partners of Birmingham, Alabama, the successful bidder in the auction of the base, announced plans to develop a health care center for military personnel at the site soon after the sale was finalized. After those plans failed to materialize, Meridian Behavioral Health Systems, the parent company of Charleston’s Highland Hospital, announced in March 2018 that it would open a residential substance abuse rehabilitation center at the site in partnership with Highland and the Gersh organization.
By early 2019, that plan, too, had been scrapped, but Gersh remained interested in the site.
“I thought that creating an autism community there would be the best and highest use for the facility,” he said.
Gersh parted ways with the Massachusetts recovery center he had been working with to fulfill his part of the arrangement with Meridian. He negotiated a lease for the property. Then he focused on developing the former military base into a place where young people with autism can learn life skills, go to school and get vocational training.
Since the base was designed for pedestrian access for those who lived and worked there, “there is no traffic to worry about, giving children the freedom to get to school, go to the store and get home by themselves,” Gersh said. “People can come here and learn to navigate our community, and then return home and do the same there.”
In addition to operating a K-12 boarding school for those on the autism spectrum, Gersh said, the Sugar Grove campus will offer customized therapeutic programs, provide post-high school vocational training and give all students the opportunity to develop independent living skills.
“We will have our own bakery, raise our own eggs and so some farming” and offer therapy programs incorporating horses and dogs, Gersh said. “Families can come and visit and stay on the premises … We’re building something the world has never seen.”
When fully operational within about five years, the Sugar Grove campus will accommodate about 400 students, and maintain a staff of about 300, according to Gersh. “It’s a big undertaking,” he said, “but nothing that’s great comes easy.”
While Gersh said he is hopeful an initial group of students will start classes this fall at the former Navy base, he acknowledged it would be wise not to carve that opening date in stone.
“But sometimes you put a plan in place and COVID laughs,” he said.
Legacy by Gersh’s Sugar Grove campus makes use of the support base formerly used to house Navy personnel, dependents, administrative facilities and base amenities. A nearby operations area equipped with numerous parabolic receiver dishes and a 60,000-square-foot underground center was not included in the 2016 auction.
The Navy’s presence at the Sugar Grove site began in the late 1950s, when it was selected by the Naval Research Laboratory as the site for a 600-foot-diameter radio telescope intended to intercept Russian radio and radar signals reflected off the moon. The site’s remote location and presence within the National Radio Quiet Zone were key factors in the decision to build the giant telescope there.
Construction of the telescope was halted in 1962, about two years after work began, due to design issues. The project was shelved. In 1969, the site became Naval Radio Station Sugar Grove, handling high-frequency communications traffic from Navy ships, aircraft and overseas installations.
In 1992, the base became a Naval Security Group Activity site, involved in communications research, according to the Navy at the time. But in 2013, the chief of Naval Operations ordered the base closed by the end of September 2015 based on a “determination by the resource sponsor, the National Security Agency,” to relocate the base’s mission.