The Portland School Board voted Tuesday night to rebuild the aging Fred P. Hall Elementary School in its existing location on Orono Road off outer Brighton Avenue.

By choosing to rebuild the school with $20 million in state aid, the majority of the nine-member board opted not to consider other options, which included consolidating Hall Elementary with another aging school, Longfellow Elementary School.

Laurie Davis, the only School Board member to vote against the plan, suggested that school officials needed to look outside the box at options like redistricting and school consolidation. She also expressed concerns about the long-term financial burden on taxpayers – especially the elderly and retirees living on fixed incomes – of putting all the money that is currently available into fixing one school when other schools in the district are in need of replacements or repairs.

Longfellow School is currently on a waiting list for state funding but is low on the list, making it unclear whether the Maine Department of Education will agree to fund the school project at some point in the future or whether the city will have to pay for those improvements.

Davis was unable to gather support for postponing the decision until August, with her colleagues voting to proceed with the plan to rebuild Hall Elementary School.

“Holding up Hall School is just not fair to the community,” said Sarah Thompson, chairwoman of the School Board. “For me, I think we have waited long enough.”

The rebuilding process, which will involve asking Portland voters to approve the project at a citywide referendum in 2016 – the date has not been set – will begin July 1 with a meeting of the Hall School Building Committee. The committee will oversee the design and construction of the new school, which will be built to accommodate 525 students.

Oak Point Associates, the school department’s architect, determined that building a larger, consolidated school on either the Longfellow School site or Hall School property would cause disruptions in those neighborhoods. A consolidated school built at Longfellow School’s campus on Stevens Avenue, for instance, would require that Deering High School’s football field be taken for development purposes.

This month, a group of concerned parents called Portlanders for Neighborhood Schools turned in a petition signed by more than 560 residents. The group said it wanted to preserve the city’s walkable neighborhood schools and said they were opposed to consolidation.

A so-called “megaschool” would have more then 800 students.

On Tuesday night, several parents spoke in favor of rebuilding Hall Elementary at its current location.

“We want a school our kids can walk to and one small enough so our kids don’t get lost in the shuffle,” said Scott Segal, who has two school-age children enrolled in Portland schools.

School Board member Marnie Morrione said the School Board had dithered long enough.

“We have waited far too long, and the public – we are just stringing them along,” Morrione said. “We need to move forward and be expeditious to getting back to our commitment to rebuild Hall School.”

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