Key Points:
- Wilton’s BOF gets its first look tonight at the considerations shaping next year’s school budget.
- Concerns about student AI use are prompting discussion of district-issued laptops and their potential cost.
- Enrollment shifts, facilities needs and aging classroom furniture could also influence spending plans.
Why it Matters: These early discussions offer a look at the costs and classroom priorities that could shape Wilton’s next school budget.
The Board of Finance will get its first look at what next year’s school budget might include at its meeting tonight, Nov. 10, with a possible purchase of new MacBook computers for as many as 1,800 students among the items under consideration.
Superintendent Kevin Smith shared his preliminary FY2028 budget assumptions and goals with the Board of Education at its Oct. 22 meeting — ones which will help him and the board determine district spending in the next budget cycle.
“We are exploring now, in cost modeling, what it would mean to transition the high school from a BYOD [Bring Your Own Device] environment, to a managed device environment,” Smith said, “which means, simply, that we would procure the devices and we would issue them to students.”
The change would primarily be driven by concerns and unknowns related to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) by students, and the staff challenges in managing that use.
“Having a managed device environment at the high school would enable us to curate the digital environment here, and then enable teachers to continue to allow kids to compose digitally and do things online while securing the environment and limiting access to tools that they don’t want them to have,” he said, noting there were also discussions underway about how to control the content used on Chromebooks at Middlebrook School.
“We’re in this conversation right now around the rise in the use of AI and what that means, both for the future but also for instruction,” Smith said, noting that having the high school students use in-house devices provided by the district would go some length in “protecting their cognitive development and ensuring their original thinking.”
He said that he and his administration are engaging in a study to gather information on not only AI implications, but also screen-time use and access to devices.
“We’ve been talking to the staff,” he said, noting that he planned to survey administrators, parents and students “to get some real-time data on their perceptions around device use.”
Smith said the district is exploring the Apple MacBook Neo as an option, which he said would cost $400 to $500 each but on retail websites are listed to start at $700.
He said the district has already purchased some which they are testing out at both the high school and Middlebrook in some capacity, looking at the effectiveness of in-house control of the devices.
“That’s a major, major, major budget implication,” Smith said, suggesting they may purchase anywhere from 1,000 to 1,800 Apple MacBook Neos, which even at $400 each would be a cost of between $400,000 and $720,000 to the town.
“That’s, I think, a major to-be-determined feature of this budget proposal,” he said. “We’re working on it now and we’ll come back to you with some recommendations.”
Smith described that the district currently buys Chromebook for K-8 on a three-year rotating basis, but said the Neo is projected to last almost twice as a long as a Chromebook.
“So, in theory at least, we might be able to half our replacement cycle over the long term,” he said.
Other Considerations
Smith said that facility upgrades will continue to drive costs, but exactly how those projects — most of which fall under the umbrella of bondable items that the town oversees — are to be funded will be part of the discussion next year.
“Inside of our existing budget, most of our facilities money is tied up in maintenance and then we do some minor facilities improvement,” he said, but in terms of need, the BOE operating budget “doesn’t come close to matching it.”
Another item that Smith said needed to be thought about is furniture replacement.
“Nowhere in our current spending in our operating budget are we doing any kind of whole-scale furniture replacements,” he said, noting that a typical classroom costs between $22,000 and $25,000 to have the furniture replaced.
“We have a lot of classrooms with furniture that’s outdated and so we need to start thinking about larger-scale furniture plans,” he said.
Smith noted that enrollment changes, including an increase at the kindergarten level at Miller-Driscoll School and a large drop of 120 students at the high school, will result in some staffing changes. Both kindergarten and 2nd grade could potentially see additional teachers added to the budget, while the high school could see a reduction.
“Looking at the enrollment change that’s coming to the high school, I’m thinking we’ll have an opportunity to either reduce, do something different, or reallocate a staff member or two, maybe three,” Smith said.
“That will all kind of come into clearer focus as we move through the next few months in the budget process,” he said.
