Lawrence school board president Marcel Harmon, left, and school board vice president Shannon Kimball , right, outline the goals and scope of the school district’s proposed 7 million bond projects during a town hall forum Sunday at City Hall.

Lawrence school board leaders outlined the goals and scope of the school district’s proposed $87 million bond projects during a town hall forum Sunday.

The event, sponsored by the nonpartisan Voter Education Coalition and moderated by Channel 6 news director Stefanie Bryant, hosted about a dozen community members that afternoon at the Lawrence City Commission chambers.

Much of the discussion revolved around the proposed bond’s biggest project, a $50.8 million overhaul of the aging Lawrence High School. There was some talk early in the planning process of replacing the 1954 building with a brand-new facility, school board vice president Shannon Kimball told the small audience Sunday, but ultimately, district leaders determined such a project would cost three times as much as renovating the current building.

“Lawrence High School has a very rich tradition in our community, and we feel it’s important to support and respect that,” said Kimball, who fielded questions throughout the event with school board president Marcel Harmon.

“And through this planning process and looking at the building and what we could do to it to make it meet our needs, and then comparing that to what it would take to build a new high school, it was very clear, at least to me, that an investment of $50.8 million in this building would do the things we need to do for our students and our teachers and the learning environment while preserving that aspect of our community’s history,” she continued.

Renovations at Lawrence High School under the proposed bond issue would include expanded classroom space, widened corridors, an enlarged food service area, safety and security improvements, a modernized media library center, heating and other system upgrades, renovated locker rooms, and an expanded and upgraded natatorium, among other projects.

The proposed improvements follow a $92.5 million bond passed in 2013 that mainly focused on modernizing Lawrence’s elementary schools. This newest bond issue, which passes to district voters in a mail-in ballot election starting this week, aims to do the same with Lawrence’s secondary schools. Free State High School would receive $15.2 million in renovations, and the district’s four middle schools would receive upgrades totaling less than $10 million at each facility.

One of the questions posed by Bryant during Sunday’s forum concerned what might happen if the bond issue doesn’t pass: Would the school board return to the issue within a year or so with a pared-down bond proposal?

The simple answer: It’s not really an option — particularly, Harmon said, for the schools at which antiquated mechanical and electrical systems aren’t providing what he considers an equitable learning environment.

“Would we make do? We’d have to make do … but we want to do better than that,” Harmon said, referring to buildings like LHS, which has had problems in the past with heating systems shutting down suddenly during winter months. “We don’t want to make do. We want to create facilities that optimally meet the needs of our kids that are on par with what we’ve got at the elementary schools.”

Kimball added, “We simply can’t meet the needs that we’ve identified through our master planning process through spending from our capital outlay fund.”

The capital outlay fund, which amounts to about $10 million to $12 million annually, is traditionally used for the upkeep and improvement of district buildings. It is a separate fund within the district’s budget and is supported by property taxes that are separate and in addition to the property taxes used to support the bond issue.

If voters decide to approve the bond, they’ll likely see a mill levy increase of 2.4 mills, district officials estimate. That equates to an approximate $55 tax increase per year for the owner of a $200,000 home.

Bryant, toward the end of Sunday’s forum, asked school board representatives what taxpayers, specifically those without children in the district, might gain from supporting the bond issue. Their response: we all do better when we all do better, essentially, to paraphrase a well-worn adage.

“I think that it makes our community more attractive to families to have high-quality facilities, and the benefits that flow from that in terms of economic development, being able to retract and retain employers — all of that,” Kimball said. “Everything that we do around this issue helps to build our community’s well-being and therefore lifts everybody up in the long run.”