Wiscasset’s proposed $8.9 million school budget passed piece by piece, intact, at a special town meeting May 25. The offer, 6.32 percent higher than the 2015-16 budget, faces a final vote at the polls June 14.

Fewer than two dozen voters joined Wiscasset School Committee members and department officials in Wiscasset Middle High School’s Stover Auditorium. Among residents turning out were retired teacher Dean Shea and wife Sandra Shea, both Wiscasset High School graduates. “We just want to support education,” Sandra Shea said after the meeting.

It’s critically important to support education and the community’s children, resident and former Wiscasset High School principal Deb Taylor said about why she was there. “It’s our future, and it’s also our tax money. So we should all be interested,” she added.

The meeting was residents’ chance to raise, lower or keep the numbers proposed for each part of the school budget. They changed nothing. Each item passed without debate; most, without questions. Voters raised yellow slips for moderator Susan Blagden to see. One item called for a written ballot vote. The warrant article proposed raising $2,490,159, or $1,048,130 more than a state funding model required; it passed with 20 votes in favor, none opposed and one blank ballot, Blagden said.

The proposed budget would expand the facilities and transportation director’s job from three days a week to five and, at Wiscasset Middle High, expand the athletic director and assistant principal posts each from quarter-time to half-time. An alternative education teacher at WMHS would go from part-time to full-time.

“I’m very pleased,” WMHS Principal Peg Armstrong said about the night’s outcome. “It means a lot to student programming and the services we provide our kids, including our students who struggle.”

Superintendent of Schools Heather Wilmot also said she was very pleased with voters’ support of the budget. She wished more had come, but the response to the budget was positive, just as it was when the school and budget committees each reviewed  it, she said.

“And we’ve had the support here, so I’m going to continue to get the word out and remind families that there’s a voting opportunity,” she said about the upcoming referendum.

Handouts included a new letter from Wilmot on the proposal and the process that led to it, starting with last winter’s community survey. “The administrative team used a thorough and comprehensive budget preparation process to meet the educational needs of the town’s children and to ensure fiscal responsibility,” Wilmot writes.

The meeting took less than an hour. Before leaving the auditorium that is named for him, School Committee Vice Chairman Eugene Stover said the panel was grateful for residents’ support of the budget offer. “I think the community appreciates the work we have done on it,” he said.