To the Editor:

It’s really important that you show up in person at the Board of Education’s and Board of Finance’s joint public hearing this Wednesday evening, March 20 at 7 p.m. in the Middlebrook School auditorium (131 School Rd.).

There’s no more important role we play as a town than in the education of our town’s children, and this meeting is the best occasion for you to let your views be known on that crucial subject. If you have young children, it can be hard to get away, especially at that hour, but there’s nothing more important that you can do for your children right now than to attend that meeting and to let your views be known on the school budget.

[Editor’s note: Wednesday’s public hearing will be streaming via Zoom, and Zoom viewers can comment during the public comment portion of the meeting.]

The budget as proposed by the BOE is rock bottom in terms of what our schools need to continue to do the excellent work that they’ve done for so many years. Our school district has done so under very tight budget constraints — constraints so severe in fact that if you look at the rate of increase in the school budgets over the past 10 years, the average school budget increase has been 1.56% while the average annual inflation rate has been 2.65%, meaning that the budget increase in that time has been on average over 40% less than the average annual rate of inflation.

And approximately 4 percentage points of the BOE-proposed 4.88% budget increase for this coming year is required under collective bargaining agreements and cannot be reduced. That leaves barely 1% for everything else — well under the current rate of inflation.

A resource–starved school system is not a fully effective one, and that does no good for any of us whatever our age or presence or absence of school-age children may be.

So please come this Wednesday evening at 7 p.m. to the Middlebrook School auditorium to let your views be known. If only a fraction of the people who came to see the outstanding Wilton Children’s Theater performances of The Music Man this past weekend showed up on Wednesday evening, it would make such a great statement for the good of our town.

Steve Hudspeth