Voters in Barre approved a new, larger school district budget, two months after a previous version failed at the polls amid criticism that it would have underfunded schools.
The new $55.6 million budget, a 5% increase over the current budget, passed by a margin of 348 votes Tuesday in Barre City and Barre Town.
In Barre City and Barre Town combined, 1,235 people voted yes and 887 voted no.
Giuliano Cecchinelli, chair of the Barre Unified Union School District board, expressed appreciation in a brief interview Wednesday.
“I’m grateful for the community’s willingness to invest in the (district),” he said.
From the 2022-23 to the 2023-24 school years, education spending in Vermont will rise nearly 8% statewide, according to state education officials. That increase — reflected in school budgets across the state — was due to a tight labor market, inflation and increased student needs, officials said.
Barre, however, was an exception. The original $53.9 million budget before voters on Town Meeting Day in March was only 1.5% higher than the current budget — a figure far below the state norm.
That small increase stoked criticism that the budget was going to underfund crucial school services. On Town Meeting Day, Barre voters rejected the spending plan by a decisive margin, pushing the board to put a new, larger draft in front of voters.
The episode was an unusual inversion of typical failed budgets in Vermont. Usually, budgets that are rejected on Town Meeting Day are seen as too large, forcing school boards to make cuts to win voters’ approval. In Barre, the opposite happened: After the first budget was seen as too small, board members proposed a larger one.
On Tuesday, voters in both Barre City and Barre Town approved that new budget, which was roughly $1.7 million larger than the plan proposed in March. Now it falls to district administrators to determine how best to spend the money.
“We’re thrilled with the results of the budget revote yesterday,” Chris Hennessy, superintendent of the Barre school district, said in an interview.
The budget approval is “just allowing us to plan, just like every other school district has been able to do since early March,” Hennessy said. “So we’re able to get to work. And it’s a great relief for everybody right now.”
Cecchinelli, the school board chair, said that, after the heated debates over the budget earlier this year, Tuesday’s vote was “really quiet.”
“You had a few people express their opinions either way, but the temperature was much lower,” he said.
