Lee Freund likes to say that his family’s house came with a dog. That’s because, two days after he and his wife, Jackie Freund, moved in with their children, Jordan, now 16, and Brooke, 13, Ms. Freund surprised them with an Australian labradoodle puppy. They named him Teddy.
Ms. Freund, 50, is the owner of Jackie David Skin Care, in Manhattan. Mr. Freund, 51, works in sales (currently from home, prepandemic in Manhattan) for a software company. Teddy epitomized the family’s new suburban lifestyle. In August 2016, they traded their 1,500-square-foot condominium in Long Island City, Queens, where they had lived for 12 years, for a home in Rye Brook, a leafy village in southeastern Westchester County. “We didn’t want to have a dog in the city,” Ms. Freund said.
U.S. News and World Report ranked Blind Brook High 25th in New York.
diverse: In the 2020-21 school year, 82 percent of the high school population was Hispanic; in the graduating class, 88 percent pursued higher education, and more than half were the first in their families to do so.
On 2019 state assessments, 69 percent of the Blind Brook-Rye district’s fourth graders were proficient in English language arts and 80 percent were proficient in math, and in the Port Chester-Rye district, 32 percent of fourth graders were proficient in English language arts and 35 percent were proficient in math; statewide equivalents were 48 percent and 50 percent. Mean SAT scores for Blind Brook High School’s class of 2019 were 680 in math and 652 in evidence-based reading and writing, and for Port Chester High, 512 in math and 509 in evidence-based reading and writing; statewide means were 533 and 531.
The Commute
Commuters to Manhattan can catch Metro-North Railroad’s New Haven line at the Port Chester or Rye stations (both are a few miles away; parking is easier in Port Chester). Rush-hour trains to and from Grand Central Terminal take 42 to 60 minutes. Fares are $27.50 round-trip peak, $20.50 round-trip off-peak and $300 monthly; currently all fares are considered off-peak.