SOUTH PORTLAND – The South Portland Board of Education will ask the City Council next month to send to voters in November a $44.2 million plan to renovate the aging high school, school officials said this week.

The Secondary School Facilities Committee finalized the figure at its meeting last Thursday after approving a little less than $1.4 million in savings from the project.

The board voted earlier this month to recommend that the council send the issue to voters in November, but after engineers said the project’s cost would grow with time, it was up to the committee to come up with a final cost.

“Now we have an exact dollar figure to work with,” said Tom Blake, a city councilor and member of the committee.

The council and facilities committee are tentatively scheduled to meet June 28 so the committee can present its adjusted project proposal. The council will then decide whether to put it on the ballot.

Originally proposed by the committee in the spring as a $41.9 million project to renovate and expand the facility, its cost had grown to $45.5 million, largely because the vote was delayed until at least November, meaning the project would likely be subject to higher construction costs as the economy improves.

Worried that residents would vote down a renovation plan if the cost was perceived as too high, as they did by a 3-to-1 margin for a $56 million plan in 2007, the committee met to shave more money off the price tag through both cuts and savings measures.

The largest part of the savings, according to Blake and Steve Bailey, assistant superintendent and the committee’s facilitator, comes from $600,000 taken out of the current school budget reserves.

Also included in the reduction is $400,000 the committee believes would be saved under an agreement with the energy company Siemens, which is already working on a plan to make efficiency improvements to the city’s two middle schools and five elementary schools, according to Blake and Bailey.

Under the committee’s proposal, the agreement would be expanded to the high school, where facility upgrades including such things as new lighting and building sealing would save energy and, ultimately, money.

“It may even be more than ($400,000),” said Bailey. “But we want to take a look at that estimate and be conservative.”

The proposal also includes $125,000 in credits from the Efficiency Maine program, which promotes the use of energy-efficient equipment and techniques.

Some aspects of the renovation, about $250,000 worth, would be taken out of the bonded portion of project and instead funded through the Maine Revolving Loan Fund, which offers low-interest loans, Bailey said. Only certain types of work qualify for that program, he said, though he did not have specifics on what parts of the project could be shifted to the loan program.

Four classrooms that were to be added to the Highland Avenue side of the building have been taken out of the project.

The school could get by without those classrooms in the near future, Bailey said, and the extra space could be added easily at some point if necessary.

“Ten years down the road, if it were determined that we needed more classroom space, it’s a pretty easy spot to make that connection,” he said.

The school is under an accreditation warning from the New England Association of Schools & Colleges because of problems with the facility.