The home economics provision was passed unchanged, and the committee for the most part avoided heated debates like that one.

Committee member Alfred B. Fantini--who at one point moved to approve the entire budget wholesale, in a motion that wasn't seconded--said he wanted to avoid public budget disputes like the one over home economics.

"This is pitting school committee member against school committee member," he said during that debate. "It is very unhealthy to the process."

D'Alessandro has prided herself on hashing out budget disputes among her own staff before the proposals go public.

"It used to be sort of a kicking and screaming process," she said in an interview before the budget was introduced last week. She said she hoped to go before the school committee and say, "We've flailed through these things and here's our budget."

From the time she first presented the budget two weeks ago up to last week's voting, D'Alessandro quietly rearranged the budget based on school committee members' comments in several days of budget hearings. During the hearings, committee members had been more vocal about their objections to specific budget items.

Thursday night, for example, she restored more than $100,000 to pay administrators in the special education department. She had originally proposed cutting several positions from full- to part-time but faced intense questioning about the cuts at a hearing last Tuesday.