During last night’s Board of Education meeting (Oct. 24), Superintendent Kevin Smith issued a correction on education spending figures that had been discussed at the prior (Sept. 26) Board meeting. At that meeting, the numbers were used to compare what Wilton spends per pupil against school districts in its District Reference Group (DRG).
Smith said that the numbers that were quoted were “in-house generated” amounts and didn’t accurately reflect official CT State Department of Education numbers. As a result, they shouldn’t have been used to compare Wilton’s spending to other districts. In addition, the amounts discussed previously had been miscalculated, resulting in figures that were under-reported.
First Smith explained that when the district develops its budget, it uses official, state-produced numbers. Those numbers are net per pupil expenditures, and are adjusted to take into account the different ways districts spend in order to be able to accurately compare spending across districts–in other words, comparing apples to apples.
However, he explained that because the available numbers from the state “only reflect the 2017-2018 school year” and were issued in January, 2019, in the interim he wanted to use more current, unofficial numbers calculated “in house” for the short term “for the purpose of trend comparison” while waiting for the state to publish official figures in January 2020. The amounts quoted at the last meeting were numbers that Smith calculated without adjusting for the different ways of spending and calculating across districts (for example some districts don’t include pre-school spending or outplaced students in their calculations, while Wilton does)–in other words, comparing apples to oranges.
During the meeting he read through the corrected amounts:
| District | Amount Previously Quoted | (Corrected) CT Dept. of Education Amount (as of 1/30/19)* |
| Weston | $22,876 (1) | $22,374 (1) |
| New Canaan | $21,916 (2) | $20,576 (4) |
| Westport | $21,348 (3) | $21,309 (2) |
| Darien | $21,112 (4) | $21,122 (3) |
| Wilton | $20,702 (5) | $20,378 (5) |
| Ridgefield | $20,202 (6) | $18,581 (6) |
He also clarified that the “in-house generated” figure previously quoted didn’t account for the one-time appropriation of $468,000 from the Board of Finance for the Genesis program–which should have been added to the current year’s budget number ($81,876,563) and used in calculating the per pupil amount.
Moreover, the per pupil number that was used in the Sept. 26 meeting had been calculated in error. “We unintentionally divided this year’s budget by last year’s enrollment numbers, so it skewed the per pupil.”
Using the most current October 2019 enrollment figures (3,868), Smith’s recalculated an “in-house generated” per pupil amount of $21,288.
“The net result of that error was an under-reporting of per pupil expenditures by $586. I regret the inadvertent error but really am thankful to have the opportunity to correct the error.”
*Source: Connecticut School Financing Project