A New York law that allows the owner of property intersected by a boundary between two school districts to choose which school to send their children to does not apply to condominiums, a state appeals court in Brooklyn has ruled.
The decision means that owners of apartments in a 28-unit building in Bronxville cannot enroll their children in schools in Tuckahoe public schools, a top system in Westchester County.
Owners of apartments in the building testified at trial that they paid school taxes to Tuckahoe for nearly three decades and relied on representations from officials in the district that the right to select their school was available to them. The jury sided with the owners but the trial judge, at the urging of the district, set the verdict aside and entered judgment in the district’s favor.
The ruling on appeal turned on interpretation of New York’s education law, which denotes two circumstances when a homeowner may choose their child’s school: when a boundary between districts divides a dwelling or when the boundary crosses property that an owner-occupied single-family home is located on.
The owners alleged that the boundary crossed property that the condo association owned in common. (The boundary did not, they acknowledged, run through their individual units.) That led the appeals court to side with the district.
“Here, the plain language [of the law] and its legislative history demonstrate that the statute is applicable only where property is improved by one single family dwelling unit, and not multiple single family dwelling units, and where the school district boundary line intersects property that the dwelling unit is located on,” wrote Justice Cheryl Chambers on behalf of the Appellate Division’s second judicial department in a decision dated July 20. “The [trial court] properly determined that the subject 28-unit condominium complex is not ‘an owner-occupied single family dwelling unit’ located on property intersected by a boundary line within the meaning of [the law].”
The court also rejected the owners’ contention that they relied to their detriment on representations of district officials, finding no basis for concluding that district officials had engaged in any “wrongful or negligent conduct” or otherwise misled the owners.
The ruling may have consequences for the value of the owners’ apartments. Tuckahoe, which sites between White Plains to the north and New York City to the south, is one of the state’s safest cities, according to a survey last year by ValuePenguin, a personal finance website, which also noted Tuckahoe’s walkability and commuter-friendliness.