How do Wilton High School officials decide what courses are — and aren’t — offered?

Students’ interest — specifically their requests for enrollment — is the driving factor in what courses are offered each year at Wilton High School, according to administrators.

WHS Associate Principal Brian Keating gave a presentation to the Board of Education last Thursday, Oct. 10, in which he explained the logic behind course offerings and course deletions.

“We usually use a general rule of 10 requests … So when we build our master schedule in the springtime, if we don’t have our threshold of 10, we won’t even offer that class,” he said.

The rule is not strict, however, as some courses this year — including Cybersecurity I, which only had seven requests, and an honors course called AP Research that only had two requests — were still offered.

Keating presented board members with a spreadsheet showing interest in new courses and drop numbers over the past six years.

“That’s a pretty good range of time for us to see how well the course is doing,” he said.

Data shows that some of the new courses offered this year for the first time are receiving strong interest from students, including AP Psychology, which originally had 102 students express interest; UConn ECE Spanish, which had 45 students request it; and AP Computer Science Principles, which had 32.

Others, however, did not fare as well this year, such as Cybersecurity II, which will not be run.

“We are attentive to whether or not the courses we propose get off the ground, whether or not they have some staying power,” Keating said.

Some courses began with better numbers when they were first proposed, such as Executive Functioning for College and Beyond, which had 15 requests in the 2019-20 school year when it was first proposed, but was then dropped three years later due to lack of requests.

Pre-algebra had enough student interest when it began in 2020-21 with 12 students, but was finally dropped this year after only four students expressed interest in 2023-24.

“There is a true art of science to all this, to offer the courses and determine which ones you’re going to run, the number of sections,” WHS Principal Robert O’Donnell said.

“The students speak with their choices,” he said, explaining that since courses are regularly removed each year, new courses haven’t necessarily required additional teachers.

“We’re not increasing FTE,” O’Donnell said, with course suggestions generally coming from teachers.

Other courses that were slashed due to low enrollment included Black and Latino Studies, Modern Prose, Writing Skills 11, Exploring Literature, and Aerospace Engineering.

BOE Vice Chair Nicola Davies raised questions regarding the removal of both first- and second-year French and first-year Latin, as well as Latin IV.

“The fact that there’s two languages where you’re not running a level-one course, that’s going to feed down the years,” she said, asking the reasons.

School administrators explained that virtually every student who has chosen to study French has already studied for a couple of years at Middlebrook School. 

“Most Middlebrook (students) start at French III … I guess that’s a sign that there’s not a lot of students that switch to French when they get to the high school,” Keating said.

By comparison, level-one American Sign Language (ASL) has had strong numbers, as have ASL II and III. 

Administrators speculated that, for those students interested in a second language, that has proven of greater interest than French or Latin.

Davies said it was a shame that Latin wasn’t being taken and perhaps should be better advertised.

“It fits in with so many other courses,” she said, adding that some Wilton students have pursued its study in college.

O’Donnell defended the process.

“I think we’re advertising them well,” he said. “We’re advertising them equitably.”

“We had long conversations about Latin and we had six students request it now,” he said. “We offered those students and families the option of doing it with a virtual high school opportunity and a couple of kids are doing that … but it was a logical decision because the enrollment isn’t there.”

“But it’s a tough one for those of us who appreciated it over the years,” he said.

Keating said he has had discussions with educators in other districts and that concern exists among them regarding a decreasing interest in Latin.

While some courses are no longer available to take, school officials said they still keep them in the course catalog for a period of time in order to provide that information for colleges that may be reviewing a Wilton student’s transcript and want to see details about a course they had taken in recent years.

“Are there any students in the building that could possibly have this on their transcript?” Keating said. “If the answer was Yes, we want to keep it in the program of studies in case there’s a college, university, post-secondary institution that’s wondering what is that course, so they can find it easily.”