Election results show districts divided

By JEFF MORRIS

Official election results from the May 20 school budget and board votes were made available by both the Bedford Central and Katonah-Lewisboro school districts last week, broken down by polling place. They show significant variations in support for the budgets in different parts of each district.

Bedford Central

While the 2025-26 budget passed with 73 percent of the overall vote, that level of support did not exist districtwide.

The most lopsided vote in favor of the budget came at Mount Kisco Elementary School, where there were 419 votes for and 67 against — a ratio of 86 percent to 14 percent.

By contrast, at the other end of the spectrum was Pound Ridge Elementary, where the vote was 261 Yes and 240 No — a winning percentage of only 52 percent for and 48 percent against.

Falling in between were West Patent Elementary, with 254 in favor and 55 against, or 82 percent to 18 percent; Bedford Hills Elementary, where the vote was 188 to 74, or 72 percent to 28 percent; and Bedford Village Elementary, where 314, or 67 percent, supported the budget while 151, or 32 percent, did not.  

The most budget votes, 501, were cast at PRES, followed by MKES with 486, BVES with 465, WPES with 309, and BHES with 262. Thus, the largest number of votes cast was at the school where the budget received the least support.

Voting for the school board also varied across the district.

Gilian Klein, the current board president who was reelected, actually finished in fourth place at MKES. There, Leo Sposato, who came in fourth overall and thus was selected to fill the final year of an unexpired term, received the most votes, with 359, followed by Eric Florio with 348, Robert Mazurek with 271, Klein with 185, Blakely Lowry with 159, Prasad Krishnan with 145, and Amal Shady with 99. Florio, Mazurek and Shady did not finish in the top four districtwide and were eliminated.

Klein’s strength was at BVES, where she got 342 votes, and PRES, where she got 341. Along with 222 at WPES and 158 at BHES, she came in first overall with 1,249 votes.

The second place finisher, Lowry, who had a total of 1,193 votes, mirrored Klein’s performance, with her largest number—actually more than Klein — at BVES, where she accrued 347 votes. And at PRES she got 340 votes, only one fewer than Klein. The main reason she did not finish in first place was the fact that at BHES, Klein got 158 to her 127.

Sposato finished in fourth place despite coming in last at BVES, with 151 votes. Bedford Village was also where Shady, who finished last overall, had her best performance, with 217 votes, ahead of Florio, Mazurek and Klein. It was also the only school where she received more than 200 votes.

Similarly to Klein and Lowry, Krishnan’s third-place finish was powered by large totals of 313 and 304, respectively, at PRES and BVES. 

Florio, who amassed 348 votes in Mount Kisco, could not come close to that total elsewhere, failing to crack the 200 mark at any other school, resulting in his fifth-place finish.

Katonah-Lewisboro

As has been the case in prior budget votes, the Katonah-Lewisboro spending proposition did best at Katonah Elementary School, where it received 82 percent of the vote — 281 for and 61 against. It did a little less well at Increase Miller, where the 283 votes for were actually two more votes than it got at KES, but there were 107 votes against. That resulted in a 73 percent winning percentage at IMES.

The outlier, again as in previous years, was Meadow Pond, where there were 180 votes for and 141 against, or a winning percentage of only 56 percent compared with the other two elementary schools, resulting in a districtwide percentage of 71 percent. 

The most budget votes, 390, were cast at IMES, followed by 342 at KES and 321 at MPES.

Voting on propositions 2 and 3 followed the same pattern as Proposition 1, though each of the additional proposals, which had no tax impact, gained more “Yes” votes and fewer “No” votes than the budget.

In the uncontested election for trustees, the three candidates — Arwen Thomas Belloni, Jon Poffenberger, and Carolyn Snell — maintained the same order of finish at all three polling places, with Snell first, Belloni second and Poffenberger third. And the number of votes each received at each elementary school was consistent with the number of budget votes cast at those schools.