By David Delcore
Staff Writer

BARRE TOWN — The budget for the town’s pre-K-through-8 school system isn’t ready for prime time.

On a night when the proposed budget that will appear on the ballot in March was scheduled to be adopted by the School Board, it was barely even discussed.

Voters can rest assured it has been, according to Chairwoman Brenda Buzzell, who offered a detail-free update on a spending plan that she said is still a work in progress.

“Our board has been working very diligently on our budget,” Buzzell said during Wednesday night’s meeting. “We are not ready to approve it yet. We are still looking at a lot of numbers.”

Board member Brent Tewksbury, who is chairman of the board’s finance committee, echoed that assessment. If Superintendent John

Bacon hadn’t steered the conversation back to budget-related territory near the end of the meeting, discussion of the budget would have spanned less than a minute.

As it was, Bacon didn’t break new ground involving the board’s deliberations. His comments focused exclusively on three numbers over which the board has no control. One of them — the town’s common level of appraisal — was recently set by the state; the other two — the state education tax rate and the base education rate — are both estimates.

For the complete story, see Friday's Times Argus.