LEWISBURG — A group of borough residents aren’t convinced building a new high school is advisable, and they believe others in the community feel the same way.

Moreover, the critics think the “table vote” method used at the school board’s Community Dialogue on Facilities Tuesday was misleading and camouflaged dissent.

There was no way to suggest an option outside predetermined scenarios, said Samantha Pearson, a parent with two young children in the school district.

“The ‘dialogue’ was really a soliloquy,” she said. If you didn’t join the consensus at your table, she said, your voice went unheard.

District Superintendent Mark DiRocco said there was opportunity to write in suggestions. Those will be considered by consultant William DeJong in preparing his next recommendations, he said.

In September, in what was billed as Community Dialogue No. 1, attendees were asked to complete questionnaires about the district’s four school buildings and their preferences in a variety of areas, from class size to educational amenities. DeJong, of Ohio, studied the buildings, considered the public responses, and returned this week with 11 scenarios for reconfiguring the buildings and/or new construction.

At Tuesday’s meeting — Community Dialogue No. 2 — people sat in groups at tables and discussed and evaluated the suggested options. As tabulated, the result was an overwhelming “yes” vote for building a new high school.

The favored scenario for all schools would cost an estimated $47.3 million. That idea includes additions to Linntown and Kelly elementary schools and the Donald H. Eichhorn Middle School, as well as a new, 160,000-square-foot, $40 million high school.

Those in attendance unanimously agreed they would support a property tax increase of 1.5 to 2 mills to pay for the projects.

But Pearson said she has heard that several people, independently, have come up with the idea of a high school-middle school swap.

That is, moving the high school population to the middle school site in East Buffalo Township, where there is room to grow and install athletic fields, and moving the middle school pupils to the high school building at 815 Market St.

That wasn’t an option presented.

“There are options that haven’t been explored,” said Mary Howe, mother of a Lewisburg third-grader. “There are options that haven’t even been thought of.”

There’s a potential, Howe said, for something really good to come out of the district’s facilities planning.

“I don’t think we’re getting there by limiting options,” Howe said.

DiRocco inisisted Thursday that options are not being limited at this stage.

“We’re just at the beginning of this process,” DiRocco said.

DeJong will return Dec. 3 with a narrowed list of possible scenarios, DiRocco said. Those will be given to the Facilities Committee and there they can add, subtract, shift or create new options. Sometime in January, there will be public hearings in which anyone may offer additional suggestions.

“I’m willing to listen to other people’s ideas,” DiRocco said.

Pearson said public hearings will just pit fancy Powerpoint presentations against people saying “But...”

For all the district administration’s talk about community input, said Lewisburg resident Tom Eagan, what has been happening is “top-down” planning with pre-selected options.

“And some of them were obviously bad from the get-go,” Eagan said.

At Community Dialogue No. 2, at tables where opinions were split, facilitators, who were often school employees or Facilities Committee members, were in a position to sway the consensus, Pearson said.

School board President Kathy Swope insists there is no pre-determined course.

Jordi Comas, who has three children in Lewisburg area schools, said key variables were left out of the discussion.

“For example, what kinds of options are there for creating a centralized athletics facility to ease the burden of trying to build a high school with full athletic facilities?” Comas asked.

“Land acquisition was not on the table. If we are looking at anywhere from $35 million to $72 million in bonds, why can’t that include some smart land purchases?”

The district owns 250 acres, known as the Newman property, near the U.S. Penitentiary at Lewisburg. That property in Kelly Township was purchased about 10 years ago, another time a new high school was being proposed. Those concluding a new high school is the answer now seemed to assume the Newman property would be the site.

But to Pearson, Howe and Eagan, the idea of placing a school out in a rural area is passe.

People like a school within walking distance of the existing community, they said.

“Just because people are dispersed everywhere doesn’t mean you should put a school where it’s convenient for no one,” Pearson said.

Comas said there was not enough discussion as to how the school district’s facilities affect the wider community.

“For example,” Comas said, “one bright line for me is I do not want to see the facilities plan increase sprawl and thereby undercut a livable community. We have some of our local leaders working hard to preserve and even expand why Lewisburg is a good place to live, through Rails to Trails, greenways, downtown renovation, and so on. The facilities plan should seek to harmonize with those other local efforts.

“For the school district to completely abandon the borough is about the worst outcome of this process for me.”

Eagan said that relocating rurally brings costs to the community in addition to the basic school — sewer, water, the infrastructure of sidewalks and power lines.

Howe said Kelly Elementary is within sight of many children’s homes but they can’t walk to it — there are no sidewalks.

A high school “out in the boonies,” they said, would put “driving the kids to school” on more families’ to-do lists, and result in an environmentally unfriendly use of fuel.

“It’s in the interests of our town to continue to be a vital, compact, functioning community,” Pearson said.

Going along with the open invitation to tour the high school — its core built in 1929 — Pearson, an architect, said there are issues with its condition.

“It was not ‘run-screaming-from-the-building’ condition,” Pearson said. “It needs work.”

It was estimated that a new high school would cost somewhere in the area of $40 million, about $10 million more with a swimming pool and athletic fields.

Howe said utilizing Eichhorn Middle School, with some additions, would provide room for playing fields. There’s even more land adjacent for sale, she said.

Comas said the facilitator at his table seemed to have some preferences.

“He described how larger schools have lower overhead,” Comas said. “That is probably true, but who decided that minimizing overhead takes precedence over other factors?”

To really consider a full spate of options, Comas said, more expert information was needed to be considered. It was reported, he said, that at the first dialogue attendees said they thought an elementary school should be between 300 and 500 students.

“That is a big range to begin with,” he said. “Considering the size alone without hearing from educators or other experts about why size matters is not really the informed opinion of a broadly engaged citizenry. It is like picking the medium Coke because it is a little bit more than small and a little bit less than big.”

Pearson said another thing not considered was the grade configuration of the schools. Some school districts place seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders in a junior high. If ninth grade was removed from the high school, that would ease its overcrowding.

These are pedagogical decisions that should be made based on research, Pearson said, not community preference polling.

Comas said no one explained the overall process of how the “dialogue” will be assessed, analyzed and presented to the board.

“How will the board use this information?” Comas asked. “This same lack of clarity around who is going to actually make decisions and how much will they be influenced by the dialogue process plagued the Vision 2020 strategic plan from a few years ago.”