NORTHFIELD — The Pioneer Valley Regional School District School Committee last week approved the administration’s $17.46 million budget for fiscal year 2026, thus sending the proposal along for Annual Town Meeting approval.

In a brief discussion held one week after the budget’s public hearing, Director of Finance and Operations Jordan Burns laid out Pioneer’s budget outlook among its peers in the region, where he noted they were able to keep costs down as much as they could. The local funds portion of the budget is nearly $15.19 million, which is a 2.49% increase.

“Some of the other districts certainly have larger increases and, again, that doesn’t mean we did it the best, we did it differently,” Burns told the School Committee. “It’s not necessarily something to be celebrated. Let’s hope sometime in the future we can have a huge increase in our spending, but based on, for example, we had so much tuition revenue come in … Being able to spend more money hopefully means we’re providing better and more services for our students.”

Burns specifically singled out Frontier Regional School and its proposed 2.32% level-service budget increase, as an example of districts trying to combat rising costs outside of their control.

At both Pioneer and Frontier, as well as other districts in the Pioneer Valley, schools are facing an approximately 18% increase in health insurance costs through the Hampshire County Group Insurance Trust, while member towns sometimes get hit with big assessment increases due to state funding formulas.

“[Frontier’s] people were talking about some of the same stuff: ‘We’re going to do a little bit more from School Choice and change how we do things with rural aid,’” Burns explained. “That’s good, as a person in the industry, to see, and reassuring that other places are doing things similarly because we’re in good company and it’s great for their member towns as well.”

There was a small change to the budget that was presented on Feb. 6, as the district saw a $3,000 Medicaid filing expense increase and an $840 reduction in Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tutoring. Pioneer will use School Choice revenue to fund the $2,160 increase, as Burns said it wasn’t “worthwhile to tack on a few hundred dollars to everybody’s assessment.”

While it’s a tight budget, Burns said the district is satisfied with its work, as assessments were kept at mostly manageable levels, although Bernardston’s assessment will increase by $299,193, or 9.31%, with $182,682 of that total being driven by the state’s minimum local contribution formula.

“We’re pretty happy that we’re able to keep it reasonable. That’s a focus,” he said. “Despite all of the huge cost increases, we wanted to continue to plan and strategize and see if we can, over time, attack some of these long-term problems.”

Pioneer’s budget documents can be found at pvrsdk12.org/administration/finance. The approved budget will be sent to Bernardston, Leyden and Northfield for approval at each town’s Annual Town Meeting in the spring.

Chris Larabee can be reached at clarabee@recorder.com.