With funding for Salem’s public kindergarten program now restored to the school district’s operating budget, officials look forward to tying up the administrative details in time for the start of school in the fall.

About 170 kindergarten-aged students had been pre-registered for the program as of earlier this month, according to Superintendent Michael Delahanty, and he expects as many as 300 will be enrolled for kindergarten by the end of this coming summer.

“It is not a bad number, considering we started with 30. There are a number of people who were waiting for some kind of an outcome (on the budget issue) as well,” Delahanty said. “I believe that more people will come forward that the funding has been restored.”

The $1.6 million price tag for the implementation of the town’s first public kindergarten program – stripped from the district’s operating budget in a 5-4 vote by the Budget Committee last month – was overwhelming restored by voters during the Feb. 5 deliberative session.

Delahanty, who has campaigned for providing a public kindergarten to community as the right thing to do, described the response from residents as heartening and encouraging. Going forward, he said the district would wait to see the outcome of the March 10 Town Meeting before meeting with state officials to determine a timeline for when portable classrooms could be installed at each of the town’s neighborhood elementary schools.

The district is planning on hiring 10 kindergarten teachers, five support assistants to help children with special needs and a number of professional support staff – based on the number of students estimated to be enrolled in the program.

With the resources required to run to program already known, Delahanty said administrators could begin purchasing furniture, fixtures and equipment as soon as they begin placing annual orders for the rest of the district’s schools.

“It’s just a matter of hitting go and getting all this done. I’m most confident that we’ll have plenty of time to get up and running in the fall,” he said.

According to School Board Member Bernard Campbell, though the debate over whether or not the town will have a kindergarten program in place to meet the state’s deadline is settled, concerns over funding remain. He pointed to the state’s budget troubles as one cause for worry.

“Whether or not (state) education funding in general is going to be under some sort of cut, how that might impact the kindergarten funding or how that might impact adequate education funding in general, those would be major concerns,” he said.

Budget Committee member Stephen Campbell, who has been a critic of the school board’s decision to include kindergarten funding in the district’s operating budget rather than as a separate warrant article and called on the board to take the state to court over the kindergarten mandate, said the looming issue would be constructing a permanent home for the town’s kindergarten students.

State funding covers the housing costs of the kindergarten program for the first three years, after that it is up to the community to find a permanent location.

Stephen Campbell, who said the district has run into trouble in the past trying to get voters to go along with major construction or renovation projects, predicted the issue will resurface a year or two down the road.

“If they do it next year, I’m not sure that the economy is going to have improved very much between now and next year,” Campbell said. “It’ll be a sizable amount of money and if they continue to ask for 9 percent (budget) increases and then more on top of that they might have trouble. That’s an issue for the future.”