Residents voted overwhelming to restore $1.6 million in funding to the Salem School District’s operating budget for a state-mandated kindergarten program at the district’s Feb. 5 deliberative session of School District Meeting.

The 492 to 76 vote in favor of the amendment to the district’s operating budget – the second secret ballot vote of the night – came without debate Thursday night. School Board member Bernard Campbell urged residents filling the seats inside the tightly packed high school auditorium to vote in favor of restoring the funding for the district’s kindergarten program.

“We believe it’s the law. The law says you will implement a kindergarten program,” Campbell told the just more than 500 residents in attendance. “It’s the right thing to do.”

Though the district – one of 11 statewide without a kindergarten program – has budgeted $1.6 million for the program, roughly $920,000 in funding for the district’s kindergarten will come from the state, including the costs of new portable classrooms for the first three years of the program.

School officials estimate the district will have roughly 300 kindergarten students at the start of the new school year and have proposed a half-day program, with two classes splitting up each day of the school week. Though the town is expected to have plans for a permanent kindergarten facility in place in three years, the state has offered to fund 75 percent of the costs of constructing a new building to house the program.

Salem’s school officials hoping to have a kindergarten program in place by the start of the 2009-10 school year ran into trouble last month after the Budget Committee stripped the funding from the district’s proposed $56 million operating budget in a 5-4 vote.

School officials had pinned their hopes of having the funding restored to the deliberative session rather than create a separate warrant article containing the necessary funding for the kindergarten program. Superintendent Michael Delahanty had warned that if the funds for kindergarten were not returned to the district’s proposed operating budget, the School Board would have had to face hard decisions on what other programs to cut in order to pay for the program.

Voters also restored $333,160 for four teaching positions to the district’s operating budget earlier in the night. The proposed operating budget for the district going before voters in March totals $56,608,925.