SHARON — Voters will decide next Tuesday whether to approve a $9.5 million bond for repairs and renovations to Sharon Elementary School.

The bond would address safety issues such as fire alarms and sprinklers, and bring the school into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA. It would fund renovation of the building’s heating and ventilation systems and make entrances to the school building more secure.

If approved, the bond would also bring the pre-K program under the same roof as the other grades, K-6, and eliminate the need for the temporary classrooms, which have been the pre-K program’s home for more than a decade.

“We just don’t have the space that we need for the services that we provide,” Principal Keenan Haley said Tuesday.

Sharon Elementary School, which currently serves 165 students, was built in 1989 for an enrollment of about 100 students and has not undergone any significant renovation since its construction.

“We are providing some of our intervention and counseling programs in closets,” Haley said.

When Sharon launched its pre-K program in 2012, the district purchased two 1980s-era modular classrooms, Sharon School Board Chairman Will Davis said.

“They were envisioned as a temporary solution. They were never intended to last this long,” he said.

Bringing the pre-K students and teachers into the main school building and having the entire school under one roof is “a fairly urgent need,” Davis said.

If the Sharon bond passes, the school district will assume a 20-year loan through the Vermont Bond Bank.

The anticipated property tax increase associated with the bond is estimated to be 23 cents per $100 of assessed property value.

That’s an annual increase of roughly $715 for a $300,000 property, according to Davis.

Not everyone thinks tackling all of the district’s facility needs with a bond of this size is the best way forward for Sharon.

“They could have carved this back to something like $7.5 million and still addressed the absolutely necessary parts of the proposal,” Sharon resident and former Selectboard member Joe Ronan said in a telephone interview Tuesday.

Ronan favors delaying the vote, largely because Vermont’s school funding landscape has been so dynamic this year that there is still uncertainty about the property tax implications.

A sharp increase in health care costs for teachers and staff combined with the expiration of COVID-19 related funding pushed education spending to new heights this year. In February, less than a month before Vermont’s Town Meeting Day, the Legislature repealed a temporary 5% property tax cap tied to school budgets, threatening to send local tax rates soaring.

As school boards waited for news from Montpelier about a new tax relief formula, many delayed their annual school budget votes and returned to the drawing board to reduce spending wherever they could.

In early March floor voting, Sharon’s residents removed $475,000 in facility expenditures before approving a $6.3 million budget that increased spending by 7% over the previous year.

This has been a challenging year for many Vermont school boards. Town Meeting Day in March saw the failure of nearly one-third of all school budgets.

In the Upper Valley, most school budgets passed, although voters in the Rivendell Interstate School District rejected theirs. Another version will go before voters next month.

School bond votes in the Upper Valley have had mixed results this year.

In Woodstock, voters rejected a $99 million bond to replace the middle and high school buildings. Meanwhile, a $21 million bond to repair and renovate facilities in the Hartford School District won by just 78 votes.

Voting on Tuesday, May 7 will take place by Australian ballot at the Sharon Town Offices from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. There will be an informational meeting and discussion of the bond on Thursday, May 2 at 7 p.m. in the Sharon Elementary School Gymnasium and via Google Meet. The link for the Google Meet is on the Sharon Elementary School website sharonelementary.org.

Christina Dolan can be reached at cdolan@vnews.com or 603-727-3208.