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Voters approve school budget just under wire

HARMONY -- It took two trips to the polls and two town meetings, but Harmony voters approved a 2010-11 school budget Tuesday with one day to spare before a new fiscal year starts today.

The $1.3 million budget was approved by a vote of 75-12.

Voters initially defeated the local budget on June 8 when they voted simultaneously with the SAD 46 towns of Dexter, Exeter, Ripley and Garland. Those four towns, along with Harmony, comprise the new Alternative Organizational Structure 94. The other four towns approved their respective portions of the district budget.

Harmony voters defeated the town's local share of the budget by a vote of 136-122, even though the budget proposal called for a $47,155 decrease from the 2009-10 budget.

Last week, Harmony Elementary School Principal Michael Tracy explained that the budget defeat was the result of some misunderstanding in an earlier vote.

At a May town meeting, voters defeated an article to fund $49,000 of the budget from local funds. The figure represented a local share over and above the state funding formula that sets the amount required to be raised locally. It did not, however, represent an increase in the total budget, he said. Local taxpayers were being asked to fund an increase in local funding of $10,000 to $11,000, after losing $75,753 in state subsidy. The total budget actually decreased about $43,000.

After the defeat at the polls for the validation in the school budget process, Harmony voters returned to a special town meeting June 22, approving the original budget proposal and sending it back to another session at the polls this week.

"It was a bare-bones budget to begin with, so the board chose to send it back to the voters," Tracy said, explaining that the new budget, despite its austerity, did not reflect a cut in staff or programming. "It's just in time."