HARRINGTON – With some of them believing they can’t build a budget for next year that would maintain education standards amid $500,000 in cuts, SAD 37 directors have agreed to vote again on whether to keep all five elementary schools open, or to close one or two of them.

That vote has been set for 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 26, at Harrington Elementary.

“I don’t dare predict how that will turn out,” Deborah Stewart, the district’s first-year superintendent, said Thursday. “At this point, it’s too close to call.

“It just seems that no matter how we look for different ideas on reducing the budget, just nobody is able to come to an agreement.”

Some of the directors seek to reverse the decision they made in February, to keep the present configuration of schools. That meant they would just work toward a budget that both they and the taxpayers of the six towns – Addison, Cherryfield, Columbia, Columbia Falls, Harrington and Milbridge – can live with.

Residents of the towns with the two smallest and oldest buildings, Columbia Falls and Cherryfield, took that vote as confirmation that their “save our schools” campaign worked.

About 100 parents, students and community members had dramatically walked 128 miles to Augusta, relay-style, in the early February weather, to make their point about needing more money from the state.

Even though the commissioner of education was able to put forward about $465,000 in special funds for SAD 37 this spring, with the assistance and approval of Gov. John Baldacci, that still doesn’t seem to stretch far enough.

Now, the vote simply will be taken over. That was the biggest resolve out of the board’s fourth budget workshop last week.

“I was actually encouraged with the budget work, coming up with something that had a fair chance of being accepted by the taxpayers and still giving us what we need for funds,” said Steve Pagels, the board’s chairman.

“We were having to make some hard choices, including reducing administration. Some just balked at that.”

Two of the directors, Verrill Worcester Jr. of Columbia and Charles Peterson Jr. of Harrington, formally asked that a second vote over possible school closures be put on the next agenda.

That was supported in conversation by Corinne Stanwood of Milbridge and Everett Grant of Addison.

Pagels believes that late April is too late to revisit the issue, but agreed to schedule the vote and not restrict the wishes of some directors.

“We took a vote in February to give the five-school plan a year, to give the funding process a chance of changing in Augusta,” Pagels said. “But if there are a number of board members who want to vote again, they have the right to.”

At the Feb. 15 vote, two of the 15 directors had voted to close one or two of the schools. That meeting drew about 120 concerned residents, from taxpayers to teachers.

The board then went forward in earnest to build a budget, only to go round and round.

Stewart said she had not anticipated such anguish over the budget this year.

“I thought the directors were a little more on the same page, that we needed to do some pretty serious reducing,” she said. “They have been looking at these issues [including soaring coastal valuations] for three or four years now.

“I knew this wasn’t going to be easy, but it really has become divisive.”