Paterson Mayor Andre Sayegh First ordered three decades ago this year, the state’s takeover of Paterson public schools officially ended Wednesday with the unanimous vote of the State Board of Education and a celebration of a historic return to local governance. Yet like all instances of New Jersey’s long and unprecedented record of school takeovers, Paterson’s three-decade run under state control continues to provide a case study about how such intervention — and how it ends — is far more complicated than a simple vote. The state board took the long-expected step to wrap up what has been a lengthy transition in Paterson’s resumption of local control, one that was all but sealed in 2018 but required a protracted review process to make it official.