The Wilton Public School district has a current enrollment (as of October) of 3,735 students district-wide. According to Superintendent Kevin Smith, that’s about 125 fewer students than last year at this time. It’s a decline he attributes to fallout from the COVID pandemic.

Smith gave a broad overview of the district’s current enrollment situation at Thursday evening’s (Nov. 5) Board of Education meeting.

The district’s total enrollment figure includes students in grades K-12, pre-K, Community Steps, outplacement programs, and the Genesis program. Smith also said that the K-12 enrollment is approximately 21 students below the projection made by the district’s consultant Ellen Essman.

The current enrollment figure does account for one surprising increase:  the number of current kindergarten students is higher than last year’s number.

“Our kindergarten class, even as it is today, grew over last year. We had a pretty small class last year. And even with so many [families] withholding kids [to start kindergarten next year], we still have a larger cohort,” Smith said, noting that districts all across the state were reporting similar gains at the kindergarten level.

In analyzing where enrollment declines happened, Smith listed several factors:

  • Nine students opted for a 5s pre-school program rather than enroll in kindergarten
  • As many as 80 students opted for homeschooling. In a typical year, the district only sees “a handful of homeschoolers.”
  • “Also a dramatic number of people” opt for private school. Typically it’s a shift the district sees predominantly when students leave 8th grade for high school, but this current year, the private school trend was “really across the board.” Smith said he suspects the families that chose to make the move to private school did so for programs running full, five-day-a-week models and capping smaller class sizes.
  • Another 10 withdrew for other reasons.

From anecdotal evidence, Smith believes that for many of the families who withdrew their students from the district, the move is a temporary one.

“They made these decisions really in light and specifically as a result of the pandemic. And so once we get through the pandemic, their intention would be to re-enroll,” he said, adding that it’s something the district needs to think about when anticipating next year’s enrollment and related budgeting.

The trend mirrors what’s happening statewide. Just Wednesday, the State Department of Education announced preliminary enrollment numbers indicating a 3% decrease in total statewide student enrollment–a one-year rate of decline typically seen previously over a five-year period.

Statewide, the SDE saw the greatest declines in the pre-kindergarten and kindergarten grades, something education officials suggest may be due to parents choosing to delay the start of public schooling for their young children due to the pandemic. Other factors the SDE cited as contributing to the decline include an increase in the number of parents opting to home school their children and fewer new students enrolling in Grades 1-12.

The Board of Education will hear a fuller enrollment projection at an upcoming meeting in advance of budget discussions for FY’22.