A Budget Biography: How Kathy Wilson Helped Wheeler Reach Repeatedly for Something More
June 19, 2025
After three decades at Wheeler, Chief Financial Officer Kathy Wilson P’09 knows all of the little details that make up our school; after all, it’s core to her job. But back in 1997 when she first saw Wheeler, she didn’t know what to make of it. She was a senior accountant at Lifespan then, and one day while on a lunchtime walk, she happened upon campus. “I’m a native Rhode Islander, I grew up in East Providence, but I had never heard of The Wheeler School,” she says. “It was just such a different world for me. My dad was a blue collar worker who came over as an immigrant, and my mom never finished high school, so we didn’t know places like this existed. When I walked up to Wheeler, at first I didn’t know what I was looking at! But then I saw the kids and all this activity in the courtyard, and it was just bustling.”
A few weeks after her unexpected campus encounter, Ms. Wilson bumped into Wheeler again, this time via a classified ad in the Providence Journal. The school was looking for an accounting manager, and like a true accountant, she “put two and two together” and decided to apply. After several rounds of interviews she got the job…and she immediately went from knowing very little about Wheeler to getting a crash course in it.
“My first day working at Wheeler was also the first day of our annual audit,” she remembers. “When I came in, there was a folding table and a few folding chairs in my office, and I sat there with the auditors going through everything for three or four weeks. It was an intimidating and challenging welcome to Wheeler, but in hindsight, it was perfect because I just jumped right in, and the accountants were great. They had been with us for probably 40 years, and they had so much history of the school to share. I was an accounting professional, but they helped me get up to speed, very quickly, with accounting at Wheeler.”
In looking back to her early days at Wheeler, Ms. Wilson says she initially hesitated when she got the job offer, because she thought she might be bored at a small private school. As she quickly learned during that introductory crash course, however, “there’s no way that was going to happen! There’s always something going on here,” she says. “There are always budget requests where I need to ask, ’What, exactly, are they going to do, and how are we going to do it?’”
The answers to those questions – or perhaps the questions themselves – have been central to Ms. Wilson’s 28 years here. “I’ve learned that Wheeler never rests,” she says. “We have big dreams. Everybody here does. It’s the kids, it’s the leadership, it’s the teachers; we’re always reaching for something more.”
Given those big dreams, how has Ms. Wilson balanced those aspirations with fiscal responsibility? “We have a very healthy budget, but it’s a matter of how we spend it in order to make things happen,” she explains. “There’s so many great ideas that are presented each year, and people are so passionate about them, but the bottom line is you have to prioritize. Those are decisions that many of us are making together. Even with our healthy budget, you only have so much, so we have to allocate it in a way that is best for the school.”
When big dreams – even the simplest ones – are approved, their implementation is often a multi-year plan, Ms. Wilson says. As an example, she points to the school’s plan to increase faculty and staff salaries so they reach the 75th percentile among Wheeler’s peers nationally. “When I think of my early days here, we didn’t really have much structure as to a salary guide,” she says. “Oftentimes it was a squeaky wheel that would come in to make a compelling and passionate case for an increase. But that doesn’t make for an equitable approach,” she emphasizes. “We’ve come a long way since then. We knew that we needed a system and some kind of guide, and we’ve developed them, primarily using our benchmark schools to gauge ourselves. Again, we couldn’t do it all in just one year, but I’m grateful that our leadership, including the Board of Trustees, wanted to do this because we all recognize that faculty and staff are key, especially at one of the best private schools in New England.”
While Ms. Wilson has taken great pride in helping the school reach its dreams in a responsible way, she’s also grateful for her own opportunities at Wheeler. “I appreciate the fact that even before [Head of School] Allison [Gaines Pell] came and resurfaced Mary C. Wheeler’s philosophy about learning our powers and being answerable for their use, I saw that I had an opportunity to develop my own powers and grow in a way that I never even imagined,” she says. “This is a place where you come in and you do your job, but then, somehow you realize you can do more. I think it’s the same philosophy we have with our students. You give them all these opportunities, and then they find one that interests them, and they continue down that path.
“For me, I came in as the accounting manager, and I could still be an accounting manager, but there were so many doors that were open where I could expand on what I did here. Nobody told me, ‘You need to do this’ or ‘You need to do that.’ The opportunities were presented, and I had the ability to find my path and grow into the CFO. It’s remarkable, really, and that’s why I’ve been here for so long.”
She’s quick to add that the relationships at school are another important factor to her long tenure. “The people at Wheeler are incredible. They really care,” she says. “I truly don’t think that’s something that’s very common in a lot of places. It’s like one big family.”
Now, after three decades, Ms. Wilson is getting ready to say goodbye to her Wheeler family as she heads into retirement – when she will get to see more of her other family. “I don’t have specific plans, but I know I’m going to spend more time with my grandson,” she says. “That’s kind of all I know. I will need to have some structure, because I work best when I have my list in front of me, but now my list will have a little more flexibility.” And her grandson will be right at the top of it.
