WILLIAMSTOWN – there will be a special vote at the next school board meeting on April 13 at the high school. Voters will be asked to revisit their decision at town meeting to reduce the school budget by $400,000.

But before the meeting can be held, the school board may be required to send notices to all school teachers notifying them that they may not have a job next year.

They will also be asked once again whether to make school spending an issue to be decided by Australian ballot.

School directors were presented with multiple petitions last Tuesday, one to reconsider the budget cuts and another asking voters to reconsider a proposal to adopt future school budgets allowing the entire day for someone to cast a ballot on school budgets. They would no longer have to be present at town meeting to vote.

After much discussion and two meetings just days apart, the board members agreed to schedule the revote at the school district meeting on Tuesday, April 13.

It is unclear how school directors will handle a third petition that calls for a special election to give voters the opportunity to fill a school board seat that the board itself filled.

Winona Johnson, who mounted an unsuccessful write-in campaign on Town Meeting Day, was appointed at the beginning of the meeting last week.

She was also the person who delivered to the board the petition for a revote on the budget which contained 100 signatures, just one more than the mandated 99 or 5 percent of the voters of Williamstown.

At the school board meeting, business manager Chris Locarno explained to the board members that they are in the middle of a three-year plan to pay off an accumulated deficit of some $500,000, that the last audited fiscal year left the district $120,000 in the red and that they are now facing a deficit of $70,000 to $100,000 for the fiscal year that will end June 30.

Because of the budget uncertainty at this point, the timing of the revote and the district's contractual obligation to teachers, Mr. Locarno said the entire faculty would likely be sent notices informing them that they could not be guaranteed jobs next year. Those notices have to be sent by April 1.

Board members noted that what Mr. Locarno had to say was just further proof that the budget they asked voters to approve at town meeting day reasonably reflected the cost of running the town's schools

Board members have claimed that the deficits were a product of overly conservative budgeting designed to deliver budgets that reflected increases that the voters would ratify rather than ones that would actually cover the cost of the local school system.

Superintendent Susette Bollard said she had hoped to break that cycle in her first year as head of the Orange North Supervisory Union by proposing a budget that fairly reflected the cost of running the district.

Some residents in attendance questioned the petition and one accused Ms. Johnson of "misrepresenting" herself as an agent of the school board to people when she asked to sign the petition.

She denied that claim. Then, Chairman Alvin Avery and School Director Rama Schneider both said that the board had nothing to do with the petition.

"This is not the board's proposal," Mr. Schneider said.

"This is all part of the process and it's a legitimate part of the process and we're going to deal with it as a legitimate part of the process," he said.

"We're all in this together," he said, then continued, "the board is not sitting here trying to spend money just for the hell of spending your money ... It's my money too."

Ms. Bollard said consistently substandard test scores coupled with a seemingly endless string of deficits have fueled something of a crisis in confidence by the voters of the town.

"Trust has been broken between the school and the community," she said, stressing the district is doing everything in its power to alter what she acknowledged are troubling trends.

School directors seemed to acknowledge that they may have to live with less than the $8.1 million they asked for at town meeting.

However, Ms. Johnson said the board should push to have all the funding restored.

"We should really consider standing up for what we believe is the right budget," she said.