What's next for Lewisboro Elementary? District weighs next steps after bond defeat

CROSS RIVER, N.Y. - Looking to battle back from a crushing ballot-box defeat, Katonah-Lewisboro school leaders were compiling residents’ views this month ahead of a potential future vote on the former Lewisboro Elementary School.

KLSD voters narrowly rejected in May a $24.5 million restoration of the venerable Bouton Road building in May. The rebuilt structure would have provided a single, centralized site for the district’s pre-kindergarten program.

In a districtwide survey in June, school officials sought to learn what went wrong this time and what could be done to win at the polls next time.

Results of the survey as well as other financial data will be presented at a July 30 school board meeting. In the meantime, board members and school administrators continued to examine possible answers to parallel issues: what to do with a crumbling but proud octogenarian structure and how to meet the demands of state-mandated universal pre-k admissions.

Lewisboro Elementary School opened in 1941, educating generations of youngsters from South Salem, Cross River, Waccabuc and parts of Goldens Bridge. Faced with declining enrollment, LES closed as a school, stoking community rancor, in 2014.

Since then, the building provided rented office space for Town of Lewisboro services. Maintenance costs, however, outran rent receipts and in time the structure was declared unsafe for occupancy. Town offices have been ordered to vacate by Aug. 31.

Meanwhile, School Superintendent Ray Blanch said, the state has declared access to Pre-K services a right for all 4-year-olds in public school districts statewide starting in the fall of 2028. 

The defeated bond proposal was supposed to rehabilitate LES for Pre-K programs and provide a center for community activities. But its $24.5 million price tag and other concerns—whether less-expensive options had been explored, for example—soured a majority of voters. They defeated the bond proposition, 1,433 to 1,411, even as they overwhelmingly approved, as usual, the district’s proposed budget, more than $131 million for the 2026-27 academic year.

One Pre-K alternative has gained some traction. It calls for moving 5th graders out of the district’s three elementary schools—Katonah (KES), Increase Miller (IMES) and Meadow Pond (MPES)—into the middle school. Those now-empty classrooms, this theory holds, could then be converted to Pre-K use.

Such a move, its proponents argue, offers the dual advantages of smaller cost and less travel to accommodate the 4-year-olds. But when the school board took up the idea at its June 18 meeting, it quickly heard that Pre-K math was not a 1:1 match with fifth-grade calculations.

For fifth-graders and other elementary school students, classrooms must provide a minimum of 20 square feet of space for each child. But a Pre-K classroom must have at least 30 square feet—and provide a bathroom in the room or immediately beside it.

“So,” Trustee Carolyn Snell asked Blanch, “you're saying, space-wise, if I lose four fifth-grade classrooms that that only really equals two preschool classrooms by the time you give them the correct square footage and put in the bathrooms needed.”

Much of the opposition to the bond question has found voice on social media, including member-only sites closed to the public at large. But at the June 18 meeting, South Salem resident Sasha Burdett stepped to the lectern and made his concern with KLSD debt widely known.

The largest single liability he cited was an obligation to cover more than $241 million in so-called “other post-employment benefits” (OPEB) like retiree medical/health insurance, prescription drug coverage, dental, vision and life insurance but not pensions themselves.

“Any future LES proposal,” Burdett told the board, “must come accompanied by a reconciled, sourced multiyear financial plan or the next vote will produce the same result. This town demands more than a mere vision.”