Confronting the Challenges of 2024 in 2025

There were many unusual events in Scarsdale in 2024: a magnitude 4.8 earthquake just a few days before a solar eclipse and recent reports of mysterious drones circulating over schools and homes. More earthly events included hundreds of missing school tax bills, a building moratorium, an antisemitic graffiti attack by perpetrators who avoided security cameras and an overnight sneak attack by vandals who smashed 50 car windows without leaving a clue to their identity.

Beyond the uncontrollable the Village and schools confronted some issues that will remain on the agenda for 2025:

Village Trustees have committed to begin work on the pool complex at the end of the 2025 pools season in August, but the question is, what will replace the four pools and locker rooms, all who have exceeded their useful lives. Will we simply rebuild what is there, construct an enhanced version of the existing complex or build a year-round facility to allow for indoor swimming and community activities in every season?

Flooding and our water infrastructure will also remain top of mind. This year the Village did a major culvert project by the library on Olmsted Road and is currently dredging library pond. The school district is also planning to do work on the stream that traverses the Brewster Road side of the school to alleviate flooding. Upcoming Village budgets include $13 million to build stormwater systems to alleviate flooding, but the proposed projects seem to be deferred from one year to the next. Will this be the year the work begins on Sheldrake Road and in flood prone streets near the middle school?

As the year closed, the Mayor announced that weekly pick-up of recyclables would begin in January - a great step forward on the sustainability front. As more residents become concerned about the environment, we encourage the Village to continue to move forward with additional initiatives to improve sustainability in 2025.

Following a six-month building moratorium the Village passed some modest revisions to land use code that grants more power to the land use boards on site plan review, lot coverage, open space requirements, side yard setbacks, floor area ratio calculations and penalties that are designed to strengthen the review process for building applications, reduce the amount of lot coverage and impervious surfaces, reduce the disturbance of property, control stormwater run-off during construction, effect minor changes to home size and setbacks and impose penalties on those who defy the law.

However the Trustees failed to make meaningful revisions to bulk requirements or the tree code, so oversized homes are still being built on undersized lots. It remains to be seen if the changes go far enough to address residents’ concerns or if will more work need to be done to preserve open space and our tree canopy.

These are questions that the current Village Board, and the new Board and Mayor to be elected in March 2025 will need to address.

In the Village residents were alarmed by the slow demise of DeCicco’s. We endured months of empty shelves and calls to the support the struggling store until they finally gave up the ghost in November and announced they would close. Management of the new market need to do a full renovation of the site and they don’t expect to open until late 2025.

Without the draw of a market the downtown continues to struggle. The Scarsdale Business Alliance has taken many steps to improve the environment, including coordination with the county, Sunday Farmer’s Markets and frequent special events to draw more people to shop and enjoy the Village. Despite their efforts, the situation remains tough for leaseholders. Prohibitive rents and limited parking make it difficult to storeowners to garner a profit, and we are hopeful that the Village can attract new retailers to replace the beer bar and cheese shop that recently closed.

The school administration continues to respond to challenges posed by social media and technology. The district now requires high school students to dock their phones on the way into class, and a movement called “Wait Until Eighth” has arisen to urge parents to hold off purchasing smart phones for kids until eighth grade.

Another interesting debate occurred about the fifth grade sex education program. The inclusion of content about gender expression and gender identity and the decision to teach the classes in mixed gender groups raised objections from some parents and were cheered by others. As times and attitudes change, education changes too, and some were ready for it and others were clearly not.

Seeking to decrease the pressure on high school students, this year the high school implemented a new grading policy called the Rolling Gradebook. The goal is to smooth grading from quarter to quarter and give students the chance to recover from a single low grade or failed test that could skew their average. Some have cheered the change but others claim it has not been uniformly applied and is the cause of additional student stress.

As the school board embarked on their series of budget meetings for the 2025-26 school year, they received a sobering report of the district’s superintendent for business. He unveiled a long term model that showed that if the district continues to use reserves and excess revenues to fund the following year’s budget, in just two years the district will use up all their reserve funds.

Specifically, Lennon’s projection shows that for the 2027-28 school budget, if the district continues to meet the tax cap and no other changes are made to revenues or expenses from the projections reserves will go into negative territory.

Why the drain? In the past ten years, the number of full time employees has grown 11.7%, adding 70 employees to the headcount which grew from 596 to 666 at a time when school enrollment decreased from 4,821 students in 2014-15 to 4,703 students in 2024-25. Some of this increase comes from a move to expand the special education program and bring special needs students who were served outside the district into the district. More growth came from an expansion of the special education program to provide more class options and services for special education students at all grade levels. With Assistant Superintendent Rauschenberg calling for additional staff for 2025-26 the Board will need to make some hard decisions about balancing the special education budget against the long-term financial health of the Scarsdale Schools.

So what do all these Village and school decisions have in common? Though they are under the authority of two different boards, everything is funded from the pocket of Scarsdale taxpayers. We’ve all come to expect only the best from Scarsdale Village and the Scarsdale Schools and hope that both boards will reach consensus on solutions that will continue this level of service.

Barring any further rumblings from beneath the surface of the earth, or solar phenomenon above, here’s to another productive year in Scarsdale. We thank all the smart and savvy volunteers who have taken on this hard work and we wish them another successful year in our unique Village.