Key Points
- The Board of Education approved a seven-year lease to relocate the Genesis alternative education program to 187 Danbury Rd.
- School officials say the program is serving more middle school students than originally expected and continues to grow.
- The new location is expected to save the district nearly $19,000 in the first year while providing space dedicated exclusively to Genesis.
Why It Matters: The move reflects changing student needs within Wilton Public Schools and represents a long-term investment in an alternative learning program while reducing operating costs.
Wilton’s Genesis program — an alternative school for students in grades 7-12 — had a nice home at Trackside Teen Center since it opened in 2019, but school officials said the time has come to move on.
The Board of Education has officially entered into a seven-year lease agreement for a 4,395 square foot location in a commercial office building at 187 Danbury Rd. Genesis will be located on the third floor of the complex’s Riverview Building.
According to a memo prepared for the school board by Wilton administrators, the lease agreement at the new location will save the district around $18,775 in the first year (including two months of rent abatement at the Danbury Rd. location). The second year would be closer to breaking even, but officials still believe there would be around $3,000 in savings.
School Superintendent Kevin Smith said Trackside provided a space that had “lots of homey character and plenty of variety in terms of small and large group spaces,” and the square footage at the new location will be similar to what the program had occupied previously.
However, he added “the layout is different and the space will be solely dedicated to Genesis,” Smith said in an email.
Genesis serves students who may find it more challenging to learn in the traditional, larger school environment. According to the district’s online description of the program, students engage with project-based learning and can also access the enrichment and extracurricular activities on the main campuses, allowing that connection to peers and teachers to remain.
Smith estimated that Genesis has around 24 students currently, and has grown as expected, generally growing in enrollment over the course of the school year.
However, it has grown in unexpected ways, Smith said, adding that educators are seeing an increase in the amount of early middle school-aged students who could benefit from the Genesis model.
“One change I don’t think we were anticipating was the shift toward serving a greater number of middle school aged students,” Smith said. “While we always envisioned this program as one that would serve students in grades 7-12, we believed that the concentration of students would be high school age.”
