The building of the Kensico School was particularly well documented, having taken place during the era of the digital camera! The following pages are a photo scrapbook of the entire story of the building of the school, from architect's plans to Moving Day.

•Architect's Plans	•Groundbreaking Ceremony
•Clearing the Site and Pouring Concrete	•Framing in Wood & Steel
•A Building Takes Shape	•Trimming & Finishing the Interior & Exterior
•Moving Day!

The Kips Bay site to the north of the Middle/High School was a day camp and camp site operated for a district of New York City still known as Kips Bay (it's in the area of 2nd Avenue in the low 30s in Manhattan). The District purchased it after the camp closed; the northern part of it was built on by Pepsico, and the southern portion was purchased by the Valhalla School District in the early 1960s with the intention of building a new elementary school on it. Due to a variety of factors, one of which was a strong community attachment to Columbus Avenue School, nothing was built on the site, which reverted to woods.

Some views of the site in June, 2000, immediately before the beginning of work on the site:

Looking up the driveway of District Office to where the school will be built. The west wall of the Library and Gym is about where the trees end.	To the right of the driveway, about where the sports field would go, was an open field sometimes used for overflow parking for events at the Middle/High School.
Somewhere in the area of the front entrance, the paved path ended and the woods began. There was an old backstop just to the right of this picture, about where the 4th grade wing would begin.	Looking back down towards District Office and Columbus Ave. from about where the Kitchen or Cafeteria would be.
Just to the north of the building, in about the area where the playground equipment would go, was this small storage shed left over from the days of the camp.	A photo of the pond on the northeastern corner of the property. It is hoped to be able to make use of this and the surrounding woods for science study by Kensico students.

As the 1990s drew to a close, it became increasingly obvious that both Virginia Road and Columbus Avenue Schools were too small for the numbers of students that Valhalla would soon have. Various options were considered for how to deal with this, including putting a large addition onto Columbus Avenue School. However, it was decided that the best option was to add onto Virginia Road, and to build a new building to replace Columbus Avenue. This, along with a smaller addition to the Middle/High School, was the $21 million plan presented to Valhalla voters in November 1998. After its defeat, it was decided to present it a second time, and after this second vote, held in March 1999, the plan passed.

Through the rest of that spring and summer, the architects worked at refining their designs and adding details as the building came together. By that fall, the design was in basically the form it would be built in (though further refinements were made even after this point). Also that fall, the architects completed a detailed 3-D model of the new school, and in early November 1999, it was announced that the new school's name was to be Kensico School. As the year drew to a close, the plans were in the midst of the review and approval process with the NY State Education Department.

Once approval was granted, in the spring of 2000, the bidding process began, with contractors chosen in June. Work began on the site at the beginning of July, 2000.

ARCHITECT

• Kaeyer, Garment & Davidson, Architects, P.C.

CONTRACTORS

• Construction Manager: Eric Fritsch (JMOA Engineering, Pleasantville, NY)
  
• General Contractor: Westmont Associates, Inc. (Scarsdale, NY)
  
• Manufactured Casework Contractor: Northeast Interior Systems, Inc. (Syracuse, NY)
  
• Mechanical Contractor: Diggins Mechanical Corp. (Thornwood, NY)
  
• Plumbing Contractor: A & P Rainaldi, Inc. (White Plains, NY)
  
• Electrical Contractor: Mard Electrical Contracting (Mt. Kisco, NY)