Back on the ballot: KLSD's Pre-K plan faces voters again

CROSS RIVER, N.Y. - Voters in the Katonah-Lewisboro School District will have the last word Tuesday on a proposed $19.95 million makeover of Lewisboro Elementary School as a universal prekindergarten center.

“I hope folks are as excited as we are about this plan and can really picture the vision and will come out to vote on Oct. 20,” the school board’s president, Barbara Williams, said earlier this month.

Balloting will take place from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. at the district’s three elementary schools: Meadow Pond, Increase Miller and Katonah. It will be the second time this year that KLSD residents have gone to the polls on the pre-K question. Last spring, they narrowly defeated a more expensive—$24.5 million—proposal.

But that 1,433 to 1,411 outcome was registered on May 19, before universal pre-K (UPK) became state law. Only days after KLSD voted, the state legislature decreed that every 4-year-old will be entitled, effective September 2028, to a seat in either a public or private school’s classroom.

It will supplant KLSD’s current lottery approach to determining which applicants—only about one in four—can enroll in a pre-K class. For now, that’s the province of private preschool services like the Country Children's Center (CCC) in South Salem.

KLSD plans partnerships with CCC and other providers—Katonah is expected to have two of them—to deliver pre-K services. They’ll hire the teachers while district administrators will oversee curriculum and pass along the state’s $10,000 per child reimbursement.

But the cost of providing UPK-compliant facilities—classrooms, rest rooms, play areas—fall to the district. Voters in May effectively denied permission to borrow the LES money.

Stung by that defeat, KLSD officials sought to learn why, soliciting feedback through a survey and focus groups over the summer. In the fall, using local libraries, school board meetings and Zoom’s cyberspace stage, they fielded residents’ questions and heard their reaction to the district’s new, scaled-back answer.

Cost, the issue that doomed the original, $24.5 million UPK bond question, remained an abiding concern even after an 18 percent reduction in the price tag. Surely, taxpayers seemed to say, there’s a less expensive way to meet the state’s mandate.

What are other school districts doing? they asked more than once.

At the school board’s Oct. 8 meeting, trustees addressed that question.

Other school districts are “wishing this might go away,” said Marjorie Schiff, a past president of both the KLSD board and Westchester Putnam School Boards Association. “Districts are flatfooted and don't yet have a plan to meet the mandate,” she said.

Turning the unused LES building into an Early Childhood Center gives KLSD an option other districts don’t enjoy, School Superintendent Ray Blanch noted. “We have a very unique situation where we have an asset in place now that just does not exist in other communities.”

But the asset must meet strict state Education Department standards.

Moving 4-year-olds into school facilities built long ago to educate older students means more than removing padlocks from the doors of dusty, unused classrooms. Counter-intuitively, the square footage required for these smallest students must be greater than that allotted for K-12 classrooms. Toilet facilities—they must be in the classroom or immediately accessible from it—have either lower fixtures installed or legacy ones retrofitted to accommodate the youngsters.

South Salem’s decaying but widely beloved LES opened in 1940 and has not served students since its controversial closing in 2014. A school board committee, charged with investigating options for the building, determined that demolishing it would be more expensive than refurbishing the structure.

So, a year ago, with UPK appearing to be a sure bet, the district announced an ambitious proposal to turn part of the Bouton Road building into a combination community center and gym as well as at least eight UPK-compliant classrooms. By the time it went to voters in May, its estimated cost had grown from $20.6 million to $24.5 million, too high a price for at least 1,433 residents.

On Tuesday, voters will again pass judgment, this time on the less expensive plan, which scraps the community center but retains the classrooms, enough to seat 152 students, and the gym.