A pair of amendments to the Concord School District’s charter decisively passed on Tuesday, throwing the future of Concord’s controversial middle school project into question.

The votes could ultimately lead to the reversal of the school board’s heavily criticized decision to build a new school on the city’s east side rather than next to the current location in the city’s South End.

The two amendments create new requirements that the district receive voter approval prior to relocating a school or selling its property. The ballot questions implementing those changes received 67% and 69% support, respectively, surpassing the 60% threshold required for their approval.

Though the amendments had been framed as referendums on the planned relocation of Concord’s middle school, neither was directly a vote on that decision. Rather, according to most interpretations, the amendment about school building re-locations will trigger a subsequent vote on the proposed move unless the school board voluntarily reverses course and keeps the school where it is. If a city-wide vote occurs, the next scheduled city election is one year away.

On Tuesday, a large portion of voters interpreted the amendments as a direct vote on the planned school relocation.

“I don’t want the school moving,” said Silas Frary, 25, an assistant cross country coach at NHTI, who voted for the amendments. “I’m personally concerned about the trails behind Broken Ground. I’m also concerned about taxes going up.”

The amendments arrived on district voters’ ballots after a group of residents frustrated by the school board’s 6-3 decision last December to build the new middle school next to the Broken Ground and Mill Brook mobilized en masse. Dubbing themselves the Concord Concerned Citizens, the group crafted the amendments and organized a signature campaign to get them on the ballot, arguing that the school board had lost residents’ trust.

As momentum grew to put the charter amendments on the ballot, some school board members argued that the first question about school relocation would not apply at all to the middle school because the board had already voted on it. However, board President Pamela Walsh, who won her bid for re-election Tuesday, said that she would “honor” the amendments’ application to the middle school project despite opposing the amendments themselves.

The board could choose to fight the charter amendments, which would further delay the construction of a new school, which teachers and administrators say is badly overdue.

Concord’s middle school, built in 1957 as a junior high school, has been plagued by escalating maintenance issues for more than a decade, with discussions to build a new school beginning in earnest in late 2017. After contemplating a range of locations, the board narrowed the options for rebuilding to either on the same site as the current school, or five miles away, next to the Broken Ground and Mill Brook Schools.

The location of and timeline for building Concord’s next middle school is now as uncertain as it has been in years.

The six board members who voted for the latter option cited projections that it would be cheaper, quicker, and less disruptive than rebuilding next to the current Rundlett Middle School. But opponents countered that the selected site does not have the infrastructure to handle an 800-student school and bristled at the notion of razing up to 24 acres of forest. They also questioned cost estimates for the two potential locations, which have remained somewhat opaque.

As the plans to build the new school at Broken Ground for $152 million have proceeded, the board increased the area of trees to be cleared from 8 acres to 24 acres primarily for sports fields and additional parking. In addition, the district and its architects have not answered the public’s questions about infrastructure and site work, which made cost comparisons difficult.

Still, the district has maintained that rebuilding Rundlett at South Street would cost millions more due to construction delays and building redesign. Reversing the location decision could delay the project by as much as three years, according to one estimate.

The next city-wide election is not scheduled until next November, which is still before the state’s building aid for school construction projects is awarded, according to the district’s timeline for the project.

The board could presumably schedule a special vote to accelerate the process, but board Clerk Patrick Taylor said Tuesday that he was not sure who has the authority to call one. He said he is not aware of the board previously ever having held a special vote and said the process would involve consideration of a number of “practical considerations”.

“It would require a lot of research into how quickly it could be done and whether it would even be feasible frankly,” said Taylor, who was re-elected as clerk on Tuesday in an uncontested election.

A Monitor poll conducted in October found that while residents expressed widespread support for the charter amendments, they were evenly split on whether the location decision itself should be reversed now.

The amendments have broader ramifications on the school board’s governance, stripping it of some of the unique authority it previously held to make decisions autonomously. However, the amendments do not affect Concord’s status as the only board in the state that sets its own budget without receiving approval from a city council or voters directly.