WESTBROOK – The Westbrook school budget season officially came to a close Tuesday night, as voters elected to pass the 2011-2012 budget by a more than 2-1 margin.

The passage means an end to the budget process for the 2011-2012 school year, but school officials, while pleased with the vote, were not in the mood to celebrate.

“The real work now begins,” said Interim School Superintendent Marc Gousse.

According to City Clerk Lynda Adams, the budget passed by a vote of 780-320. Last year, she said, the school budget was part of a combined election ballot, but in 2009, the last time the public voted just on the school budget, there was only a combined turnout of 595.

“It was double what we expected,” she said of this year’s count. The crowds were steady, she said, but not overwhelming, although she said she needed to get more ballots during the day to accommodate the large number of voters.

The $30.7 million budget will cut six teachers and seven support staff, starting in September of this year. Despite massive spending cuts, equally large losses in state and federal funding mean the new budget will raise the property tax rate 37 cents per $1,000 of valuation.

School officials arrived at the proposed budget after months of negotiations and discussions over what the district could afford to cut and what needed to stay. Those negotiations involved meetings lasting into the night, often featuring tearful parents, teachers, and even students pleading for the district not to eliminate programs, teachers, or support staff.

School Committee Chairman Ed Symbol said news of the vote came as “a temporary relief,” because if the budget had been defeated, he and the committee would have had to go back to cutting more out of the budget, which most likely would have involved laying more people off.

“I don’t know what we would have done,” he said. “It would have been tough.”

Gousse thanked the public and the taxpayers of Westbrook for their support, but added that he was not forgetting that the vote shows there are still people in the city who are unhappy with the job he and the committee have done.

“There’s 321 people out there who are concerned, and we need to be sensitive to that,” he said.

Symbol said he thinks some of those 321 people were speaking not just against the school budget, but the municipal budget as well. Prior to the vote, the City Council voted to approve the combined school and city budget.

That approval set the $24.2 million municipal half of the budget in stone, including a 26-cent tax hike. Even though Tuesday’s vote will not change the municipal budget, Symbol said he was reading Tuesday’s “no” votes as for the city’s budget in general, not just the school side.

No matter what, he said, the entire budget, both city and school, reflected the city’s best effort to handle difficult economic times.

“Both sides were pretty responsible, and we did the best we could with what we had,” he said.

For Gousse, addressing the naysayers’ concerns means face-to-face contact with the public. He spent the weeks leading up to the vote getting the word out on what he and the committee had done to prepare the budget. He gave presentations, met with parent groups, went door to door, and sat with the regulars at local coffee shops.

Now that the vote has happened, Gousse said, he’s not going to stop meeting with the public, explaining the process, and soliciting ideas.

“It wasn’t just about passing a budget,” he said. “I’m not going to be a stranger.”

Symbol credited Gousse’s efforts, along with those of local parent and teachers’ groups, with getting the word out prior to the vote, both in person and via local television stations and even using Facebook.

“I think all those things combined really helped,” he said.