NORTH SMITHFIELD — The School Committee voted Tuesday night to renew Supt. Stephen F. Lindberg’s contract through June 2011, and gave him a $5,000 raise, to $120,000 annually.

Lindberg’s salary is reviewed annually, with his salary set year to year. His contract says thecommittee can give him raises of at least 2.5 percent or at most 6 percent. The $5,000 raise represented a 4.3 percent increase.

Committee Chairman Robert Lafleur said the clause was included as an incentive plan and that this year, Lindberg deserved to be rewarded.

The committee said that over the past year Lindberg had shown progress in unifying the school system’s administrative staff; he had taken the initiative in getting the School Department to share resources, such as technical services and health insurance, with the town; and he had improved the district’s efforts to involve the public.

“Over the past year, he has had a significant number of ups,” Lafleur said. “The administrative team has been working really well together, and he’s bringing the public involvement up.”

Committee member Paul Vadenais, who was the committee’s point man on the new middle school project, agreed.

“I have no issue with Steve’s leadership style,” Vadenais said.

For his part, Lindberg thanked the committee for its vote of confidence and the staff of the district for their work.

“I think the fact that it happened is really a reflection of everybody’s effort,” Lindberg said.

Lindberg was hired in summer 2005, and Lafleur said he needed a year or so to learn the district’s personnel and its internal machinations.

Earlier this year Lindberg was praised by the committee for getting the district into a new health-insurance consortium that led to a $400,000 saving in School Department insurance payments. He also had to deal with the final stages of the construction of the town’s new $30-million middle school — set to open this fall — and this year’s difficult budget process.

Before getting the top school job here, Lindberg was a school principal in Grafton, Mass. He started his career in Manchester, Conn., as a special-education aide in 1973. He moved to Grafton in 1975, when his former college hockey coach, the principal at Grafton High School at the time, needed a special-education teacher. Over the years in that district he also worked as a co-principal, director of special education and then principal of Grafton Elementary School.

jhill@projo.com