LANGLEY — It may be time for a new deal, and this time, with a full deck.

South Whidbey School Board members said this week they were willing to give a fresh and comprehensive look at how the district should consolidate schools.

The consensus came after Rod Merrell, principal of South Whidbey High School and Langley Middle School, presented a consolidation report at a Wednesday workshop that detailed how students in grades six through 12 would fit on the high school campus without the renovations proposed last year.

Merrell said the consolidation would be a tight fit. Without the new classrooms that would have been built as part of the unsuccessful

$25 million bond proposal, teachers would share classrooms, middle and high school classes would be scattered throughout the SWHS campus, and, under one scenario, would mingle in the hallways between classes.

The schools would no longer retain their distinct identities.

There were other complexities, as well, Merrell said.

“I think changing the high school from a four-period day to a six-period day is a major undertaking,” he said. “It’s not something where you are just changing when the bells ring.

“You’re going to change what the program looks like at the high school. You’re going to have four different sets of graduation requirements,” Merrell said, adding that a “complete overhaul” of  requirements would be needed.

“You’re going to have to start looking at the classes that you are going to offer, and the classes you think make more sense as an elective,” he said.

The school board decided earlier to try not to rerun a bond measure this year that would help pay for shifting LMS to the high school campus on Maxwelton Road.

This week, District Superintendent Fred McCarthy again urged the board to drop its target date of September 2012 for the move.

“I don’t think the time is right to move right now,” McCarthy said, noting that the board is currently looking for a new superintendent.

McCarthy is set to retire in June.

“If you bought a little time, one process might be to give that superintendent time to learn the system and the people, and then to facilitate the move,” McCarthy told the board.

District officials have been looking at combining schools in response to falling enrollment and declining budgets.

McCarthy said staff reductions would continue in the coming year, but noted they should not be too hard on themselves for the decisions that have been made in light of the district’s dismal financial condition.

“You will not find 5 percent of the school districts in the state of Washington that have gone through the profound downsizing we’ve gone through in five years. There are 57 fewer positions in this district,” McCarthy said.

“There are going to be 60 by the time we get done next year, or 60 plus,” he said.

“You can’t kick yourself too many times for why it didn’t work along the way,” he told the board. “We are struggling with a profoundly transforming system. You have to deal with where we are now, and where we want to go.”

This week’s meeting included many familiar refrains. Some continued to press the school board to restore trust with the community, and to heed the message sent by voters in the November election.

Many said the community would step up to help, if it felt it was being heard. Others asked officials to reconsider the closure of Langley Middle School, and said voters would have supported a bond that would have kept the school open.

Some on the board noted, however, that closing the middle school would save more than $440,000 and prevent the loss of another five or so teaching jobs.

But cost should not be the only consideration, said School Board Member Steve Scoles.

“I think there’s a shifting paradigm,” Scoles said, across the country.

“Let’s take care of what we have. Let’s not decide that we have to spend a $25 million bond to do something that apparently people didn’t want,” Scoles said.

As part of the study, Merrell and Dee Brown, the registrar at the high school, built three master schedules for students for the 2012-13 school year.

Both scheduling options — dual and single — raise issues for staff and students.

Under a dual schedule, the high school will be short one science room, and there will be access issues for science labs in Rooms 210, 211, 212 and 213.

The school will need an additional space for home ec/creative cooking.

Scheduling gym and locker- room use may pose problems. There are four locker rooms now, but two are reserved for athletic teams.

Some “less desirable” rooms, including “roundtable” Rooms 107 and 108 (outside the auditorium), 208, 204 and 205 would need to be used for teaching. Other spaces would be lost, such as the career center, parent room, high school special-ed support lab and physics lab.

The school said the dual schedule would require separate lunches for middle and high school students, but also noted that it wouldn’t be possible to separate middle schoolers from high schoolers during the school day, and that classes would be scattered throughout the building.

Under the single schedule option, middle school students would be sharing hallways with older students, too, during class changes throughout the day.

On the upside, the single schedule could mean efficiencies in shared staff and spaces.

School Board Chairman Rich Parker said the district was at an “OK, what now?” moment.

“I think it’s clear, from looking at the data tonight … it’s going to be pretty crowded. And there are going to be a lot of obstacles,” he said.

With the workshop going over much of the same ground that has been covered in recent months, Merrell said progress would not be made until the community was willing to agree on the best path toward consolidation.

“I don’t want to spend the rest of my career reliving this night over and over again. And that’s what it feels like we’re doing,” he said. “We need to figure out a way to move forward.”

The district should examine other ideas, he said. Perhaps grades kindergarten through eighth could be combined at LMS. Or maybe first- and second-graders could be taught at SWHS.

“I feel like we don’t always put all the cards on the table,” he said. “We’ve got to get to the place where we put all of the cards on the table.”

Board members agreed.

“Let’s go back. Let’s look at it all,” said Board Member Leigh Anderson. “And see if we can’t do a better job the second time around.”

The conversation needs to center on the students, she said.

“It’s got to be about student achievement,” Anderson said.