PERU — The Board of Selectmen voted Monday evening to approve an article asking residents to appropriate $10,000 from surplus for a four-person committee to work on withdrawing from Regional School Unit 10.
Secretary Angela Barkhouse said the Finance Committee also met to discuss the article.
“Both the selectmen and Finance Committee voted in favor of the article, which will be placed on the warrant for the June ballot,” she said. The wording of the article won’t be exactly the way petition organizer Natalie Sneller of Canton presented it, but it’s the same premise, Barkhouse said.
Residents involved with the withdrawal effort met with selectmen March 30 to ask that the article be on the town meeting warrant, but the board said it wanted to see the petition filed before anything was approved.
Sneller said residents in the former School Administrative District 21 towns of Peru, Dixfield, Canton and Carthage were circulating petitions asking for a vote to form withdrawal committees in each town to work on negotiations and to appropriate money to fund the cost of negotiations, research and analysis of withdrawal agreements.
Other towns in the district are Buckfield, Hartford, Sumner, Mexico, Rumford, Byron, Roxbury and Hanover.
Sneller said in a previous interview that the Dixfield petition is asking for $50,000; the Peru and Canton petitions, $10,000 each; and the Carthage petition, $8,000.
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