All the tea parties in the world couldn’t douse voter support of their local school budgets on Tuesday, when only one budget was defeated in Erie and Niagara counties.

Statewide, voters approved 92 percent of school budgets.

Although anger at Albany is running high across the state, voters still seem to see their local school budgets in a different light than the dysfunction of state government, both school officials and taxpayer advocates seem to agree.

“Here, you’re talking local schools; there, you’re talking state elections,” said Rus Thompson, a local Tea Party activist. “School boards, I think, put together the best budgets they could. So people are basically supporting their local schools.”

If anything, he said, voter anger at Albany may have helped pass the school budgets, because voters saw local schools as the victims of a state government that can’t even pass its own budget on time.

With some districts closing schools and cutting jobs this year, voters seemed convinced that schools were doing what they could to contain costs.

“What happened is that fear of a taxpayer backlash prompted a fairly large number of school districts to take what were for them extraordinary measures to hold down spending,” said E. J. McMahon, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a fiscally conservative think tank.

Local taxpayer activists seem to agree.

Lee Chowaniec is a frequent critic of the Lancaster School Board and its spending practices.

This year, though, he had little to complain about, he said. The district presented a budget that carried a 1.3 percent spending increase, with a 5.8 percent tax levy increase—even after closing an elementary school. The district faced an uphill battle, with a significant loss of state aid that left Lancaster officials to look for ways to plug the budget hole.

“I thought it was a reasonable budget,” Chowaniec said. “This year they really had to make some difficult cuts. They didn’t have the goose laying the golden egg.”

Voter turnout this year was high, in the world of school voting.

The county boards of elections do not track voter enrollment by school district, so it’s hard to know what percentage of voters cast ballots in most places. But a few districts do precisely follow municipal boundaries, making it possible to track voter turnout. In those places, between 10 percent and 20 percent of registered voters turned out on Tuesday.

That was enough to more than

double the number of voters from last year, in several districts.

“The turnout was just incredible,” said Ralph Kerr, a retired superintendent and president of the Teaching and Learning Institute in Houghton. “If I had seen the turnout as a superintendent, I’d have been very nervous. Normally, a large turnout means ‘No.’ ”

This year, though, the only “no” in Erie and Niagara counties was in Lockport, where voters narrowly defeated the budget.

Although taxpayers throughout the state are riled up, there are not many organized groups of them, McMahon said.

“All of the organization and money that can be concentrated on school budgets is on the ‘yes’ side. Statewide, [New York State United Teachers] spends millions of dollars promoting yes votes,” he said. “On the other side, you have ragtag groups of taxpayers, if they can even be called groups.”

The voter turnout may be the result of more districts having contested races for board seats, some say.

“It’s really a reflection of whether there is a contested election or not. It’s a very common response,” said Grand Island Superintendent Robert Christmann. “When you have, as many districts do, two seats and two candidates, it tends not to bring out as many voters.”

In Erie and Niagara counties, two-thirds of the districts had contested races.

Some of the more hotly contested races were in the Kenmore- Town of Tonawanda and Grand Island school districts, two places where teachers have been without a contract for several months. In each district, the teachers union was successful in its efforts to oust incumbents, replacing them with candidates they believe will be more sympathetic to the union.

In Ken-Ton, teachers have been without a contract since July 1 — the longest time the union has been without a contract in the 37 years Don Benker has been president. He would not elaborate on exactly what resources the union devoted to the election this year, but he said teachers’ frustration is palpable. The union recently declared an impasse in negotiations.

Charles Gallagher was campaign manager for the incumbents, his wife, Kellie Poynton- Gallagher; Kathleen Gielow; and Charles Wuest. Gallagher said the teachers union pulled out all the stops in their efforts to unseat the incumbents.

When the new board members— James Simmons, Robert Dana and Stephen Brooks — take office in July, they will constitute a majority on the five-member board.

Once the new board majority is in place, Gallagher predicted a contract will be approved by September.

Grand Island teachers, who have not had a contract since September, backed two challengers this year. Donna Tomkins and Paul Krull each got more than twice as many votes of either incumbent, Thomas Franz and Neil Seaman.

After seven years on the board, Seaman said he saw the writing on the wall once he saw the challengers’ lawn signs sprout up on teachers’ lawns.

“It’s a pretty potent organization to be running against,” he said. “I don’t have the resources they do—phone banks and postcard mailings. I’m just an ordinary citizen. You’re up against a different kind of animal there. You’ve got to respect it — I don’t necessarily agree with it, but I respect it.

“That’s the way things are. That’s the organization they have. That’s part of the way we do business in this area.”