SHEFFIELD — For the first time anyone involved can recall, all five towns in the Southern Berkshire Regional School District will skip voting on the school budget at their annual town meetings.

Southern Berkshire Regional’s budget is in such disarray, the towns are giving Southern Berkshire’s School Committee more time to finalize to the point it’s “complete and accurate.”

Ordinarily, the school district budget is set and ready by May, when the annual town meetings convene. This year, the towns will ask voters back to vote on the school budget — the spending plan that includes how much each town contributes to the schools — at special town meetings in June.

This is no ordinary year for the Southern Berkshire Regional budget.

This year’s school budget process has been rocky from the start — with frustration over past management, missing data and confusing financial reports leading to infighting within the School Committee and a leadership shakeup in early March.

At the first budget hearing March 12, residents and town officials didn’t focus on the budget itself. Instead, they raised concerns about transparency, possible financial mismanagement and how the numbers were presented — asking for a detailed, line-by-line breakdown rather than broad categories.

Since then, Superintendent Brian Ricca and a temporary business manager have been working to fix the district’s financial records, which officials say contain missing and misclassified data due to bookkeeping errors in recent years.

In its letter to the School Committee, Alford’s Select Board wrote that the additional time would allow towns to present the school budget — and each town’s portion of what it must fund — “responsibly to their constituents.”

The other four towns — Sheffield, Egremont, New Marlborough and Monterey — sent a similar letter to the Southern Berkshire Regional School Committee.

Timing now becomes crucial: Town budgets for the next year start July 1.

If at least four towns fail to approve the school budget by June 30, the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education steps in. The state would then implement a month-to-month budget until a new one is approved.

Not having a school budget to vote on at the annual town meetings seems to be “uncharted waters.” That’s based on conversations with town leaders, DESE officials, local attorneys and the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, according to Ricca.

Ricca called the extension an “extraordinary gift of time.”

The district will use a level budget, adjusted for any contractual and fixed costs, along with staffing changes, as a starting point. The goal is still to stay within the 6 percent assessment increase cap set by the school committee.

“We are optimistic that the overall assessment increase will come in below the 6 percent cap,” Ricca said. “Our intent is to develop a budget that is both fiscally responsible and responsive to the needs of our students, staff and communities.”