Public kindergarten and a joint middle school may have a hard time becoming a reality now that the Auburn Budget Committee has come out against them.

At the Auburn School Board’s hearing before the Auburn Budget Committee on Thursday, Jan. 31, the committee voted not to recommend those two articles.

The Budget Committee split 4-3 against the $25 million joint middle school bond with Candia, and 5-2 against the costs for state-mandated public kindergarten.

The prospect of building a 102,000-square-foot middle school for Auburn and Candia students, and the $25 million bond that comes along with it, has been highly contentious in both towns for the past year.

In Auburn, discussions have taken an important turn with the state Legislature’s decision in September to require public kindergarten for all the cities and towns in the state.

Auburn is one of 11 school districts in New Hampshire without public kindergarten. Currently, students attend one of three private kindergartens or are homeschooled.

While at least one of those districts appears to be dragging its feet, said School Board Vice Chairman Kathleen Porter, Auburn picked up the pace to draft a warrant article for the coming elections on Friday, March 14.

At a recent roundtable discussion scheduled to get citizen input on the joint middle school, the discussion quickly turned to kindergarten, Porter said. “We had a great discussion about kindergarten and how enthusiastic people were,” Porter said.

The finalized kindergarten article asks for $382,833 for costs to renovate and furnish a 2,000-square-foot space in the Village School that formerly housed technology education classrooms. Those classes were moved to another area of the building, Porter said. The article also asks for $111,660 in operating costs for the first year of the program.

The kindergarten project would be reimbursed for 75 percent of the building costs, bringing the actual cost falling to taxpayers to $398,785, including first-year operating costs. “It comes down to maybe $47 per household,” Porter said.

At their warrant article hearing, said Budget Committee Chairman Lewis Theos, members voted according to what they felt the community wanted.

Public kindergarten and a middle school have been voted down in townwide majority votes several times, he said, even when the student population at the Village School peaked about a decade ago to more than 600 students.

There appears to be no set penalty by the state if public kindergarten is not started, despite the mandate to have it in place by September 2008.

Theos said he advised the Budget Committee, after the vote, to reconsider the kindergarten article because of the state’s legislation, and worried the town would lose the 75 percent reimbursement for building costs if the warrant article doesn’t pass. The committee chose not to revisit their decision, he said.

“At least it still goes to the town and the town can make that decision,” said Theos, who as the chairman is not regularly a voting member of the Budget Committee but does vote when there is a tie on a particular issue. While he participated in discussion on the warrant articles, he did not vote.

Discussion on the joint middle school in Auburn will come to a head at the official public hearing on the bond at Auburn Village School on Tuesday, Feb. 12, at 6:30 p.m.