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

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DALTON — After a fraught, five-year process, the Central Berkshire Regional School District appears poised to win approval of its amended regional agreement.

At a special town meeting on Wednesday, Dalton residents are expected to vote in favor of the plan. The proposed agreement must be approved by six of the seven member towns to be adopted; five already have approved the plan.

“They passed it last year, so I don’t foresee any challenges with it passing,” said Rich Peters, chair of the Central Berkshire Regional School Committee. “I don’t see any arguments that they would have to not pass it.”

If the proposed regional agreement fails, the current agreement will remain in place until a new version is passed by the member towns, which include Dalton, Becket, Washington, Cummington, Hinsdale, Peru and Windsor.

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 process.

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.

If approved, the amended regional agreement will take effect on July 1, 2026, said Gregory Boino, the district’s director of finance and operations.

The School Committee last April voted to send the amended regional agreement back to the towns for a vote, Superintendent Michael Henault said. The committee took a team to each community’s town meetings and addressed questions residents had, and put together informational sheets that showed how the agreement would impact the towns.

“I think both the information and the team effort and being there to support towns in understanding it really went a long way [in getting approvals],” Henault said.

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.

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

Boino noted there is new language in the agreement that makes a town-by-town vote the default process for approving capital projects.

“That’s, I think, the strongest language we can have about capital projects,” he said. “I think that [is] protecting those small towns.”

Peters said the reason behind updating the regional agreement is that the district has been operating on an agreement that is not approved by the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Boino said another important change in the agreement involves the process of withdrawing from the district.

Cummington had considered withdrawing about 10 years ago and there was “no clear language in our regional agreement [on] how that works,” Boino said. The updated agreement does include such language, he added.

Other changes to the agreement involve a clearer description of the budget and apportionment process that is currently used and a change that obligates a town to pay pension and other post-employment benefit costs should it withdraw — or join. Under the new agreement, apportionment formulas won’t change for either operating or capital budgets.

The updated agreement also adds clarity regarding the process to amend the agreement and adds a provision for five-year reviews.

If Dalton approves the agreement, it would still need approval from the state. DESE 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.

“We feel good that once it gets to DESE, it will be approved,” Boino said.

Other meeting items

In addition to approving the new regional school agreement, Dalton residents will vote on the following questions:

• Amend a vote taken under the motion for Article 3 of the May 5 annual town meeting involving one or more departments in the town’s operating budget with $75,550 in total increases and $151,050 in total reductions.

• A transfer of $94,000 from sewer stabilization to fund environmental consulting services to bring the town in compliance with it’s MS4 Stormwater Permit.

• A transfer of $175,000 from the capital stabilization fund to fund the 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.

• A transfer of $89,000 from sewer stabilization to fund a sewer engineering project on Dalton Division Road.

The special town meeting will begin at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Wahconah Regional High School Auditorium, 150 Old Windsor Road.