BEVERLY — As Mayor Bill Scanlon put the finishing touches on his school consolidation plan Wednesday afternoon at City Hall, Superintendent James Hayes sat in his office about a mile away.

Hayes did not know what Scanlon was about to propose at that night's School Committee meeting. In order to prepare, he had to guess what Scanlon was thinking and sketch out numbers based on that assumption.

The image of the city's two top officials working separately on plans to reshape the city's schools has frustrated and infuriated many residents. With the city staring at a $2.6 million school budget deficit and the prospect of school closings and teacher layoffs, they wonder why the mayor and superintendent can't work together.

"They need to find some common ground," said Leslie Tenhope, who has two children at Cove Elementary School and attended Wednesday night's meeting. "I respect both of them and what they have to do, but they should be united and work together. It's hard to see them clearly antagonistic."

Asked yesterday about their working relationship, Scanlon and Hayes both said they won't let this week's conflict affect their ability to deal with the school budget crisis.

"Can I get past it? Absolutely," Hayes said. "There's a higher need here. That will always be my focus."

"I'm sure everybody will be professional," Scanlon said.

Yet their accounts of the days leading up to Wednesday night's meeting don't inspire confidence that they can work together. Scanlon said he called Hayes' office on Wednesday morning and asked to meet with the superintendent.

"I called at 9:15," Scanlon said. "The message came back that he was too busy to see me."

Hayes said he declined to meet with Scanlon because it would have been too late in the day, and he was busy preparing for the School Committee meeting. Hayes also said he had tried to arrange a meeting with Scanlon the day before.

"I called him Tuesday morning and said, 'Bill, we need to talk about this thing before you bring it about,' and he refused," Hayes said. "He said, 'I'm not going to tell you until Wednesday night.'"

On that night, Scanlon proposed closing McKeown School and using $680,000 from the city side of the budget to keep Cove School open. Six week ago, Hayes had proposed closing both Cove and McKeown and turning them into an early childhood education center and a secondary alternative school, respectively.

At one point in the meeting, Scanlon referred to information in Hayes' plan as "just the superintendent's numbers."

"I really resent the comment 'just the superintendent's numbers,'" Hayes said.

Scanlon has said he came out with his last-minute plan because he wasn't satisfied with Hayes' proposal and felt it was his obligation as mayor and a member of the School Committee to come up with his own.

Hayes says Scanlon was wrong to keep him out of the loop.

"I and my staff have the educational expertise that needs to be brought to bear on this," Hayes said. "It's important that the mayor or anybody work through the superintendent. I am their executive director.

"That should not happen again," he said.

This is not the first time the mayor and superintendent have publicly butted heads. Two years ago, they argued over how many employees were in the School Department.

But Hayes said he and the mayor "buried the hatchet" after that episode and have worked well together on the $70 million high school construction project.

"We have a good division of labor on that," Hayes said. "We've been a terrific team in moving this project forward."

Scanlon said it does neither him nor Hayes any good to get into a "big brouhaha." Asked to describe his relationship with the superintendent, Scanlon said, "We're certainly on speaking terms."