Residents Voice Their Opinions on Proposed 4.66% School Budget Increase

Roughly 150 residents attended Wednesday night's Board of Education budget hearing at Middlebrook School, about the same number as have emailed their thoughts on the budget to town officials so far this year.

Board of Finance Chairman Warren Serenbetz began the evening with an overview of the town-wide budget numbers and outlined the next steps in the process:

• April 12: Board of Finance completes deliberations on budgets and mill rate
• May 3: Annual Town Meeting
• May 7: Adjourned Vote

Board of Education Chairman Gilmore Bray followed by leading the audience through a surface-level presentation on the school system budget and some of its implications and drivers.

The BOE budget proposal for 2012 stands at $73,547,609, a 4.66 percent year over year increase. Bray noted both that this was a decrease from the 5.32 percent proposed increase of a month or so ago, and also included a $909,00 decrease in the superintendent's budget.

The largest driver of the proposed budget increase was salaries, with existing staff pay rising by $1.9 million. This included an addition of 5.15 FTEs to the school system's workforce. The salary allocation is split as follows: 82 percent to teachers/counselors/social workers, with the other 18 percent going to administrative, clerical and maintenance positions. Bray included an interesting statstic that said 92 percent of Wilton's teaching staff have completed advanced degrees.

Other operating costs (including transportation and utilities) are slated to rise $843,000, or 25.8 percent, and supplies and equipment costs are set to rise $519,000, or 15.9 percent.

Bray said the school system has been focusing both on cost containment and trying to increase its transparency. He pointed to the fact that the Board of Education has reduced its electricity consumption by 9.4 percent since 2008 as an example of the former.

Transparency, meanwhile, is a goal of the Board of Education but is restricted, Bray said, by the BOE's "legal responsibility to protect individual privacy." Still, he pointed to the recent development of televising all BOE meetings and posting videos of the meetings on the school system's website, along with an array of budget, class size, and technology statistics and discussions as examples of the BOE's efforts in this regard.

Bray also addressed a common concern that Wilton's costs are rising dramatically because it is known as a great school system for children with learning disabilities, thus attracting families with special needs children (who are more expensive to educate).

"Families with special needs children move to communities like ours because of the quality of the school system," Bray said. "Most families with children with special needs also have children who do not have special needs...our percentage of special needs kids is roughly the same as other area towns."

Bray said 9.4 percent of Wilton's students have special needs, as compared to 10.2 percent in the DRG, and 11.4 percent in the state. He also included a poignant statistic on autism. In 1997, Wilton schools had two children with autism. In 2010/11, they have 56.

All told, the hearing last about two hours and the comments portion was civil. Around 40 different residents spoke, including two Wilton students: High Schooler Simon Brewer and 8th-grader Andy Perry. By a rough count, about 25 of the residents voiced their support of the budget.

A collection of resident comments will be included in a separate article.