CARRABASSETT VALLEY – Voters will consider the annual school budget, formalizing contracts and making improvements at a special town meeting tonight.

There are eight articles on the warrant, including choosing a moderator for the meeting that starts at 7 p.m. today at the Outdoor Center.

The town pay tuition for students in kindergarten through 12 to attend SAD 58 schools with some high schoolers opting to go to Carrabassett Valley Academy with their parents paying the additional cost.

Voters will be asked to approve a school budget of $931,292, Town Manager Dave Cota said. The amount raised last year was $863,036, he said.

The town has 41 elementary pupils, 43 high school students of whom 20 go to CVA, Cota said.

Voters will be asked to raise and appropriate $555,440 for education, meeting the guidelines of the state’s essential programs and services funding model.

This is the amount of money determined by state law to be the minimum amount that a municipality must raise in order to receive the full amount of state dollars, Cota said.

Townspeople will also consider raising and appropriating $243,044 in additional local funds, which exceeds the state’s model by $217,179.

“We tuition our kids; there’s nothing we can do about it,” Cota said of the overage.

Voters will also be asked to formalize a contract with Carrabassett Valley Academy, he said.

“We’ve been tuitioning kids to CVA for many, many years,” Cota said, without a formal contract.

With the new school consolidation plan approved by the state, town and school officials want to make sure there is a contract on record to continue the practice.

Residents will also be asked to formalize a contract to lease space for hangars at the Carrabassett Valley Airport.

The town owns the land, and for more than 20 years has leased out space for the hangars, he said. However, there is some question whether officials back then had the authority to do it so this contract would make it official.

Another article on the warrant asks voters to appropriate up to $9,400 from the town’s undesignated surplus for improvements to the Information Center and related Sugarloaf Area Chamber of Commerce.

They want to develop a virtual, interactive Web site for the chamber, that for $50 a year a business would have an individual page and be able to change the information on it.

Other improvements include a new information center electronic kiosk and wireless Internet hub. Cota said people could drive into the center’s parking lot and use the Internet if their laptops are equipped with wireless capabilities.