Sheffield — After a long and often tense discussion at their meeting on Tuesday, March 17, members of the Southern Berkshire Regional School Committee decided to postpone a vote on the budget for fiscal year 2027 (FY27). Instead, the committee eventually decided on scheduling a special meeting to discuss and possibly vote on the budget on Thursday, March 26.
At a previous meeting, Superintendent of Schools Brian Ricca put two proposed budget options before the School Committee.
The first option is a FY27 budget of $22,548,063, a $1,938,599 (9.4 percent) increase over FY26. In this option, the revenue and expenditure budgets—which include operating, transportation, and capital budgets—are increasing by a total of 9.4 percent. If passed, assessments to district member towns would increase by 18 percent.
Ricca’s second option is a total budget of $21,209,278, an increase of $599,814 (2.9 percent) over this fiscal year. This proposal would see revenue and expenditure budgets increase by 2.9 percent, while town assessments would increase by 9.6 percent.
At the March 17 meeting, members of the committee were critical of both of Ricca’s proposed budget options.
At the beginning of the discussion of the budget, Ricca requested that the committee make a decision on the budget “so that towns can plan appropriately.”
“Selfishly, I think it’s important that, for the first go round, we are doing this as the calendar and warrants and laws dictate,” Ricca said. “It would be most helpful if we had something to aim for in terms of the [town] assessments.”
Committee member Arthur Batacchi made a motion to have town consultants TMS of Auburn, former superintendent and current school district consultant Beth Regulbuto, and Ricca consult with one another on budget numbers “because we’ve talked about all the numbers, but we believe everybody’s different with numbers across the board.”
“I think with all those brains in the room and everybody working together, I think we could end all this and get the right numbers on the table,” Batacchi said. “I’m making a motion that we move in that direction.”
Kimberly Alcantara seconded the motion, with Chair Julie Hannum amending the motion to include members of the district’s Finance Committee.
“I believe we are so disorganized about all the numbers, and I think if everybody was in the same room, with everybody having the same thoughts, they could explain how certain things got to certain points,” Batacchi said. “I just think that, at the end of the day, hopefully we’d be in a far better place.”
“I think a good foundation for a FY27 budget is to understand where FY26 ended,” Alcantara said. “After we closed FY25, what was carried over? Because, right now, the current budget has no offsets on it. We’re through the [financial] roof, and we’re being asked to put a very tall roof on at an 18 percent [budget increase] with not all the information there.”
Hannum said there is a document on the school district’s website that shows budget offsets. “While I think that the concept [of Batacchi’s motion] is very good to get us more information, I just don’t think that our timeline is going to allow us to get what we need in a timely fashion,” she said. “It doesn’t mean we can’t try.”
“I think that at this point in the game, it’s March 17, and we have to have an answer to our towns,” Vice Chair Amy Bainbridge-Jordan said. “I feel like there has been September, October, November, December, January, and February to have gotten everyone in the same room and gotten our answers. The fact is that hasn’t happened already, and I’m not sure that it will happen given an extension, which then will put all five [member] towns in a difficult predicament for them to solve. Given the fact that we haven’t heard from [former superintendent Regulbuto], who has been contacted in the last couple of weeks to answer the questions that have been given to her most recently, I think that ship has sailed, and I think that tonight we really need to get an answer so we don’t put five towns on pause.”
The board continued to debate over which is more important: passing a budget quickly—even one several members called “incomplete” in terms of data—so that member towns could have assessments on the books or working to make sure everyone is working from the same numbers before passing a formal budge.
“I’m not opposed to getting everybody together,” member Carl Stewart said. “But what does that mean? Can it be translated into something practical? What can happen at that meeting that hasn’t happened already?”
Alcantara continued to insist that a meeting between school district consultants and members of the Finance Committee needed to happen. “We never really had a clear start with FY26,” she said. “There seems to be a lot of murkiness. A ‘circuit breaker,’ school choice, our grants, none of that is included in this budget whatsoever. I cannot see a single offset.”
Prefacing her remarks with “this is probably going to make me a very bad person in everybody’s eyes,” Alcantara suggested the committee pass Ricca’s second budget option. “We have to be fiscally responsible to our towns,” she said. “It also gives us incentive to work harder, so that there are no program cuts, there are no employee cuts, there are no activities cuts.”
Eventually, committee member Bonnie Silvers made a motion for the committee to hold a special meeting on March 26, with the Finance Committee meeting at least two days before the meeting to bring forward a budget recommendation.
The motion was seconded by Alcantara.
“The purpose of this is to get all the missing pieces that have been identified in the past few days as missing filled in,” Silvers said. “I am now speaking as one individual who has to vote on this, and I don’t see how I could vote on it. I don’t have exact numbers in a lot of areas. I don’t want teachers being nervous about this [budget], and I don’t want our parents thinking that there is a major problem in terms of finance.”
“I’m just going to be a broken record here and say that, if this hasn’t been accomplished already, and for how many months, what is one week going to do?” Bainbridge-Jordan said later in the meeting. “We have a responsibility to our towns, and we’re pushing this off to meet again.”
Eventually, Silvers’ motion passed in a split vote, with Silvers, James DiPisa, Miguel Mir, Alcantara, Batacchi, and Chair Hannum voting for the motion, and members Stewart, Bainbridge-Jordan, and Nanci Worthington voting against the motion.
