By By Dylan Thompson,Dylan Thompson — The Berkshire Eagle,The Berkshire Eagle

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DALTON — Dalton voters have cleared the final local hurdle for a long-awaited update to the Central Berkshire Regional School District’s governing agreement.

The proposed agreement had to be approved by six of the seven member towns to be adopted; Dalton was the sixth to approve it.

The regional agreement was one of five articles that were unanimously approved at Wednesday’s special town meeting held in the auditorium at Wahconah Regional High School. The meeting, which lasted under 30 minutes, drew 53 registered voters and about four guests, Town Clerk Heather Hunt said.

Michael Henault, superintendent for the Central Berkshire Regional School District, told The Eagle in an email that he looks forward to “leading Central Berkshire Regional Schools with the new agreement as its foundation.”

The amended regional agreement will take effect on July 1, 2026, according to Gregory Boino, the district’s director of finance and operations.

Despite approval from six of the seven towns, the amended regional agreement still needs approval from the state. The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has been looking at the agreement all along, Boino said, adding that the agency agrees with the language that the School Committee and towns voted on.

The regional agreement sets the district’s process for generating and approving its budget; establishes the composition of its school committee; and lays out the process for withdrawing from the regional school district, among other functions.

The district worked with the Massachusetts Association of Regional Schools and had step-by-step state oversight during the five-year process. The seven member towns are Dalton, Becket, Washington, Cummington, Hinsdale, Peru and Windsor.

Becket, Washington, Cummington, Peru and Windsor had already accepted the regional agreement this year, though Hinsdale again rejected it. Hinsdale, Peru and Cummington rejected the proposal last year.

The agreement amends the district’s governance document, originally drafted in 1958, to get it in line with decades of change in the Massachusetts General Laws. Central Berkshire is the state’s geographically largest school district and had an enrollment of 1,562 as of Oct. 1, 2024.

The overall budget for the district for fiscal year 2026 is $36,643,001.

Opposition from some of the smaller towns sunk last year’s effort to approve the plan, mostly due to lingering concerns about the construction of Wahconah Regional High School in 2019. That project proved controversial as members of the School Committee opted for a districtwide popular vote instead of a town-by-town decision.

During the special town meeting on Wednesday, a resident asked how future capital projects would be voted on under the updated agreement. Boino said that the default process for capital projects will be a town-by-town vote.

During the town meeting, residents also voted to approve a transfer of $94,000 from the town’s sewer stabilization fund for environmental consulting services to bring the town into compliance with its MS4 Stormwater Permit.

They also voted to approve a transfer of $175,000 from the capital stabilization fund for costs related to three capital improvements involving installing gutters in Town Hall, purchasing nine new computers for Town Hall and repairing a headwall on Yvonne Drive.

Residents also voted to approve a transfer of $89,000 from the sewer stabilization fund for a sewer engineering project on Dalton Division Road.