Key Points
- Wilton’s school enrollment has fallen short of the consultant’s projections for a second consecutive year.
- Updated forecasts anticipate two more years of declines before enrollment begins to rebound.
- Shifting student numbers could prompt staffing changes, while housing development influences longer-term projections.
Why It Matters: Enrollment forecasts help guide school budgets, teacher assignments and planning for future classroom needs.
Enrollment numbers are again lower than expected for Wilton Public Schools, with the 2026-27 school year projections made by an outside consultant overstating the number of students actually attending the district.
On Thursday, Oct. 22, the Board of Education heard the annual report from its enrollment consultant, MP Planning Group, LLC, which had projected 3,603 K-12 students in Wilton for the current school year. As of October, only 3,541 are enrolled, according to WPS — 62 fewer than projected.
MP’s report from early October 2026 puts the district’s K-12 population at 3,550, putting the difference between that count and its earlier projection at 53 students.
Under the consultant’s median projections, Wilton High School is anticipated to see a drop of 91 students next year, while Miller-Driscoll School is expected to gain 22 — 20 of them in kindergarten. Middlebrook School is projected to increase by 14 students, while Cider Mill School would lose 21.
Last year’s projections by MP Planning Group had also overestimated numbers for the 2025-26 school year by 112 students.
Pat Gallagher, cofounder and MP principal, again explained that enrollment numbers were “trending below” expectations, despite their projections for this year having been “revised downwards.”
Offering a 10-year enrollment forecast, Gallagher projected that Wilton’s K-12 enrollment will continue to decline overall for the next two years before making what he projects will be an upswing in 2029-30, with growth continuing after that.
While he offered a range of projections, with both high and low estimates, he recommended the district use the medium projection.
That scenario shows Wilton’s K-12 enrollment falling from the consultant’s count of 3,550 this year to 3,474 in 2027-28, and then bottoming out at 3,462 in 2028-29.
In 2029-30, enrollment is projected to grow to 3,516, then continue upward over the next seven years, reaching 3,750 in 2032-33 and finally 3,910 in 2036-37.
While the housing market since the pandemic — and related inward migration — have contributed to a decrease in new students arriving in town, new and planned multi-family housing developments are expected to increase student numbers over the longer term, Gallagher said.
“2021 was our peak year for home sales. We saw almost 300 new students between October of 2020 and October of 2021,” he said. “And that has decreased each of the last five years. For 2026-27 we have just over 100 new-to-district students and that decrease has been felt across all of the grade groupings.”
While Gallagher said other area towns have all experienced similar enrollment declines amid a slow housing market, Wilton, however, is something of an outlier because of the number of multi-family housing development underway or planned. A portion of that is affordable housing, which he said tends to bring higher numbers of students with it.
“That’s helped keep it a little bit higher than some of your peers,” he said.
According to Gallagher’s figures there are 256 newly occupied units, 301 units under construction and 480 approved units, for a total of 1,137 units. An additional 275 units are in the initial planning stages.
While affordable units can have generate a higher ratio of students, Gallagher said the projections assume 28 students per 100 units across developments.
“We’re estimating that when all of these units are completed, we’ll have an additional 219 students involved in public schools,” he said.
“We haven’t applied different assumptions for individual projects,” he said. “That’s certainly something that we can look at in future updates.”
BOE member Lori Bufano pointed out that the larger developments depend on sewer capacity, as has recently been reported.
“I think we’re close to max for any large projects, so this could be it,” she said.
Superintendent Kevin Smith noted that at this time the school buildings have capacity to accommodate enrollment increases. In comments he made later in the meeting about preliminary budget plans for Fiscal Year 2028, Smith said that the projections may warrant an additional kindergarten teacher, while two or possibly three teachers at Wilton High School may need to be reassigned because of what may be a loss of close to 100 students.
Over the next 10 years the largest enrollment increase is expected at Middlebrook, according to the projections, with its student population rising from 822 this year to 974 in 2036-37. During that same period enrollment at the high school is projected to bottom out in 2029-30 with 1,038 before climbing back up to 1,129 in 2036-37.
Conversely, according to the projections Miller-Driscoll’s K-2 population will show continuous growth into 2031-32, when it would hit 867, then stabilize, with changes of only two or three students annually in the ensuing years.
Cider Mill, meanwhile, is projected to bottom out next year with 795 students in grades 3-5, then increase in fits and starts, reaching 903 students in 2029-30 and topping out at 948 in 2034-35 before beginning a slow decline.
