LORAIN — About 75 residents gathered Sunday afternoon at Longfellow Middle School to discuss several sites for the new consolidated Lorain High School and the possibility of it being the first building in a proposed 60-acre “health and education” campus in the heart of downtown.

Architect Gary Fischer ran the forum, in which several residents said they didn’t want the high school to be part of that campus, while others offered up a wish list that included everything from an urgent care center to a boating school.

The school board is considering four sites and has been holding public forums to get the public’s input on these locations. It has $70 million from the Ohio Schools Facilities Commission to spend on a new high school. All four sites are near Broadway at 21st Street.

Several residents said they want to see the new school built at the site of Lorain Admiral King High School.

Resident John Wargo said he’s frustrated the site isn’t even on the list of possibilities.

“Why not use that 37 acres over there? Everything is paid for,” Wargo said. “Why do they want to spend all these millions of dollars when they’ve got the property, we own it and the utilities are there. … It doesn’t make sense. There’s something not right.”

School board President Tony Dimacchia said he’d love to see the new high school be a spur for something “bigger,” with a “wow effect.”

“We just don’t want a high school — we’re already guaranteed that,” he said of the state funding. “We want something bigger than that, something that’s going to hopefully revive our community that’s been getting beaten up for the last 15 to 20 years with the decline of the steel industry and the fall of the automotive industry. We’ve been hit pretty hard.”

Board member Paul Biber said the Admiral King site is “the ultimate fallback position” and is being considered, but the district would like to get something more for their money.

“It would be stimulus as a broader project, stimulus for the whole city,” he said of incorporating a new high school into a larger downtown campus.

Biber acknowledged the district can’t purchase property with the $70 million, but he said partnering with the public library, a health care facility, Lorain County Community College and the Lorain Port Authority, as well as applying for state and federal grants, to purchase property would make the downtown locations feasible.

Residents in favor of putting the new high school in the planned campus said their wish lists for that campus would include a new branch of the public library, a swimming pool, a stadium for sports, a recreation center, day-care facilities, walking paths and a garden.

The fourth and final public forum is scheduled for 6 p.m. Thursday at the South Lorain Branch Library.

Dimacchia said that after the final public meeting, it’s decision time.

“We’ll put all the input we’ve gathered at these meetings together and we’ll figure out where to put (the new high school) and how many partners we have involved in this and what direction we go in next,” he said.

Contact Alicia Castelli at 329-7144 acastelli@chroniclet.com.

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