Citing the rising cost of healthcare benefits and the high, predetermined contractual increases for staff, Wilton Public Schools Superintendent Kevin Smith has proposed a $94.1 million school budget for 2024-25, representing a 5.56% increase over the current fiscal year.
The Board of Education heard the first details on the $94,140,103 request Thursday night, Jan. 11 at its regular meeting — a $4,958,411 increase over the $89,081,692 approved last year. [The slide presentation is available at the end of this article.]
Emphasizing that it was an “initial” budget — a descriptor he used last year as well – Smith left the door open for a decrease in his proposal, referencing the Board of Finance‘s statement in November that it wanted to keep the Mill Rate increase under 4%.
“It was my goal to meet the Board of Finance request … but I have not found a way to do that yet without reducing existing programs and staff,” he said.
The Board of Education will ultimately decide what figure to put forward as its proposed budget later this year.
In his presentation Smith omitted any reference to the recently released School Facilities Needs Assessment report, which claims there are $132.1 million in repairs and upgrades needed over the next 10-15 years.
“This operating budget deals with district operations and routine maintenance, mostly minor,” he told GMW after the meeting. “All of the major repairs (such as) roof replacement, HVAC … are detailed in the 10-year plan and need to be addressed through a separate fund. All of this will emerge as the budget season unfolds.”
While creation of a new facilities fund is under discussion, the BOF is still considering asking to put at least part of those costs into the school’s operating budget, and/or the Board of Selectmen budget. A joint meeting with the Boards of Education and Finance is scheduled for Feb. 8, following the school board’s sole discussions and deliberations on the budget proposal.
Smith’s proposal includes a $2,699,909 increase in salaries, accounting for 54% of the total proposed increase. While $324,000 of that amount involves a personnel increase of 4.5 FTE (full-time equivalent) next year, he said that approximately 75% of the current staff, due to their longevity and post-graduate degrees, will be topping out at the highest amount these individuals can be making per contract.
“The majority of the increase is driven by the increase of existing staff … We have a very experienced and comparatively well-paid staff,” he said. “It just so happens that many of them are at the top steps this year.”
The second largest portion of the increase, 22%, or $1,082,244, is for employee benefits.
“As a school district, we are a people organization,” he said. “Our work is done by people and there’s a lot of work to do.”
Other notable increases include $446,615, or 9%, for contracted services; $353,001, or 7%, for purchased services; $215,810, or 4%, for equipment; $69,371, or 1%, for property services.
Full budget books, including line-item details, were not available to the public Thursday night, but Smith indicated they had been provided to BOE members.
“Inflation has impacted expenses,” Smith said, noting that contract costs have risen in transportation, among other areas.
While costs are rising, Smith said Wilton enrollment is projected to decline by 26 students overall next year, from 3,810 to 3,784, with 44 less students expected at Wilton High School, and 22 less at Miller-Driscoll School, balanced with 21 more at Cider Mill School and nine more at Middlebrook School.
“We’ve been in a pattern of enrollment decline for a number of years,” he said, but noted it was projected to start going up again in three years.
Toward that end, Smith put in a plug for maintaining low class sizes, especially at the elementary grade. While he admitted research has been mixed since a 1985 study in Tennessee known as the Star Report vehemently spoke to its value, he said the demands put on teachers encourage keeping the number of students that they’re responsible for low.
“Students come to school with a range of backgrounds and learning concerns,” he said, requiring that teachers devote more time to individualized instruction and assessment.
“We also expect teachers to forge relationships with families and communicate routinely,” he said.
“Class size is one important variable, but also part of a number (of things) that influences students’ achievement,” he said, stating that the district has consistently kept class-size numbers below what he said are the “planning average” numbers, which fall within a local policy-driven range at each grade level.
Noting he would give more details in an upcoming presentation, Smith said the new budget includes a new kindergarten teacher at Miller-Driscoll, an additional classroom teacher for Cider Mill, and an additional full-time multilingual learners teacher.
“The complexion of our student body over time is changing … It’s important to be reminded that we have lots of different kids with different needs,” he said, “and they need lots of support, and it’s our obligation to support them as best we can.”
He noted that special education requirements and related costs continue to increase.
With 570.44 FTE in the proposed budget, Smith said it was a “budget-to-budget difference of 4.5 FTE.”
“I can make an argument that we would benefit from an increase to our administrative staff,” he said, noting he has been turning down the requested addition of a dean at the high school for several years.
Smith said that the 5.56% increase was a relative reduction from the 8.76% increase initially on the table at the beginning of his planning, based on all the requests that came in from different schools and departments.
Among the items that were omitted were $231,750 in facilities requests, $101,115 for training and conference requests, and $1,866,343 for “requests that require staffing/stipends.”
Smith shared praise for his district — not only for its considerable achievement in various areas, including academics, art and athletics — but also measures it has taken to help avoid significant costs with programs like the Genesis alternative learning program and the Community Step program. Thanks in part to the work of Assistant Superintendent of Special Services Andrea Leonardi, he said having these programs available in town saves the district large amounts of money that would have to be spent for out-of-town placements of students with unique needs.
“We have effectively been able to run our operation,” Smith said in summary. “We’ve done it fairly well. The concern I have is degradation of services over time.”
“Our primary goal with this budget is continuous improvement,” he said, calling the budget “a financial expression of our values.”
“I feel pretty confident that as a system we’re focused on the right skills,” he said, calling the district “exceptionally strong” with students that compete at the highest levels.
“I’m very cognizant of the guidance that the Board of Finance established … It wasn’t achievable,” he said.
The BOE is scheduled to hold public in-person budget workshops Jan. 23-25, with a “community conversation” scheduled for 10 a.m. on Jan. 25. Workshops are not broadcast/streamed live but are recorded and posted online. Members of the public are welcome to attend workshops in person.
My initial impression from the slides is that this budget is doing less preemptive cutting than some of their previous ones, which I think is a good thing; put a proposal to fully fund the district’s needs on the table and negotiate from that starting point. I particularly appreciate their reversing this year’s reductions in funding for school clubs, which have really stung – I know a LOT of CM parents are very unhappy with the lack of 3rd grade intermurals and math club, CM Singers, etc, and will probably be eager to help push back against any BOF-mandated budget cut that would shutter those programs for a second year.
(I am left to wonder how last year’s budget process would have gone if the staffing reductions at Middlebrook had been presented as a reluctant last-resort reduction which could be blamed on the BOF, though I suppose that might have been difficult since they were coming in the context of the schedule change; the cuts were undoubtedly made in anticipation of pressure from the BOF – nobody wants to run a school with fewer teachers – but if they’d made that connection more obvious to voters, we might have seen a win for “no, too low” and perhaps even elected a more school-budget-friendly BOF in November)
Here we go again…. Endless debates about what % to increase, how anything less than the initial ask is a “budget cut”, Michael Love endlessly pontificating and responding to every comment, yada yada yada…
Let’s start with a new approach. How about we start employing zero-based budgeting? Start with a blank sheet of paper and build up your assumptions from there.
If we were starting a school from scratch what would it look like? How many teachers would you want? What courses would you want to offer, etc…?
Anything that doesn’t resemble the school you would want, remove today. Budget for what you need to get where you want to be.
We need to stop with the endless +/- % budget conversations and start from scratch. Until we do this, we have to assume we have a sub-optimal school system and there is waste to be repurposed.
Once again a Republican proposes improving the school budget by waving a magic wand, rather than, say, laying out specific cuts you’d like to make. I mean the budget documents are right there on the BOE website, it would be incredibly easy for you – or any of your compatriots – to go through item by item and identify specific things that you consider wasteful.
If you really think this “starting from scratch” exercise is useful, why don’t a bunch of you guys get together and, y’know, do that? You don’t seem to think much of the superintendent’s judgement, or the BOE’s, so it doesn’t seem like you’d need them to participate in this process. Draft an alternative school budget – from scratch, as you propose – then compare it to the current one and be prepared to argue for the resulting changes/cuts. Maybe you won’t get everything you want, but if the budget is indeed as wasteful as you say, then presumably this exercise will unearth all sorts of obvious waste that many other people will be amenable to cutting.
Also, I don’t see how your comment is any less “pontificating” than mine, and I would be absolutely delighted if other people chimed in and responded to these endless silly budget-cutting arguments so I didn’t have to.