Central Bucks is looking to borrow more than $200 million to upgrade elementary schools. Here’s what to know about the project.

The Central Bucks School District is weighing how to update eight aging elementary schools to upgrade their electrical and plumbing systems, add air-conditioning, and bring restrooms and other spaces into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act — a project that will cost more than $200 million.

But it has not decided how to proceed. The district is considering two options: constructing a building to replace two of the existing elementary schools and renovating the other six, or renovating all eight. (Central Bucks, Pennsylvania’s third-largest district with more than 17,000 students, has 15 elementary schools in total.)

To field community questions and solicit feedback, district officials have been holding town halls; the third and final event is planned for 7 p.m. Thursday at Central Bucks South High School.

Here’s what you need to know about the proposal.

The project is expected to be the district’s largest capital investment in decades, with both options projected to cost around $240 million; the district would borrow the money. Officials have not yet released information on how much taxes would have to increase. A district spokesperson said details would be shared at Thursday’s town hall.

“There will be tax implications for any of these options — there just will be,” Central Bucks’ chief operating officer, Tara Houser, said at a town hall last month. She added that the district “went almost 10 years without any major renovations and tax increase, and eventually you have to make those changes.”

At that meeting, Houser said the cost of renovating the eight schools was estimated at about $241 million, while building a combined school for current Doyle and Linden Elementary students and renovating the six other schools — Barclay, Buckingham, Gayman, Kutz, Titus, and Warwick Elementaries — would cost about $240 million. (The costs are preliminary: “No one knows what any of these projects will cost for sure until you actually go out to bid,” Superintendent Steven Yanni said at the February town hall.)

The district had previously proposed an option to combine Doyle, Linden, and Kutz Elementaries — the three schools with the greatest needs — into one newly constructed school, while renovating the other five. But parents in those communities pushed back with calls to save their local schools, and the district removed what some had dubbed the “mega-school” option from consideration.

District officials say they are limited in their ability to build small elementary schools by a 1973 state law known as the “Taj Mahal Act.” That law, intended to curb excessive spending on school buildings and ensure transparency for taxpayers, establishes allowable construction costs by square footage, based on the number of students who will be served by the building.

As a result of the calculation, it is harder to build small schools with common areas like gyms, cafeterias, and teacher planning spaces, Houser said. (Schools that want to surpass the spending threshold set by the law, Act 34, can do so — but must get voter approval first through a district-wide referendum.)

While the projected costs of the two options currently before the board are comparable, administrators say the approach that involves replacing Doyle and Linden with a combined school, to be built on the Doyle site, would be more economical. A new school building has about a 75-year life span, district officials say, compared with 20 to 30 years for renovations.

And renovating, rather than replacing, Doyle and Linden would not allow for certain structural changes, including the addition of flexible spaces for group learning, according to the district.

The district has issued a request for proposals for more extensive “gut” renovations of Doyle and Linden, but officials say the cost of that option might be prohibitive.

“If we gut any of these buildings, we need to find a place to put kids for two to three years,” Yanni said at last month’s town hall. He said the district was concerned with “how do we move students the fewest number of times. … We don’t want an entire school year to be an upheaval.”

The elementary school project comes amid other big changes in the district: Central Bucks is moving to expand its high schools, in preparation for shifting ninth graders from district middle schools to those buildings. Sixth graders, meanwhile, will be shifted from elementary schools to middle schools.

And the district is adding full-day kindergarten, with a pilot program launching this fall and expected to expand district-wide in 2026-27.

District officials will be seeking a decision from the board on the project this fall, after gathering information about the cost and feasibility of gutting Doyle and Linden.

At a school board committee meeting last month, Houser noted the district had spent $785,000 on building assessment and demographic studies since 2017.

“We cannot study anything any longer. We need to make a decision,” she said.