A proposal that might have saved Lorne Avenue Public School from being closed has been scrapped.

The London Intercommunity Health Centre says it's no longer interested in moving some of its programs into the school.

"We've been working hard to get partners and the LIHC would have been a significant partner in the school. It's kind of disappointing that we're going to miss out on some of the programming for families and kids that they could have potentially brought," says Scott Maclean from the advocacy group Save Lorne Ave.

The Dundas Street clinic says it's bursting at the seams and needs to expand but it wont be at Lorne Ave.

The clinic has withdrawn a proposal to transfer some of its primary health care and outreach programs into the aging school building.

Retrofit costs are estimated at between $4 million and $6.5 million and board chair Janet McAllister says that's double what they were expecting.

"When you look at a health centre, we need extra plumbing, HVAC, we have a lot of extra standards than a school would have so there's a lot of different structural issues with that. And again, we had mixed feedback from the community about moving some of our services there."

There have been concerns from some community members that programs servicing drug addicts would also be moved into the neighbourhood.

"Their client base is active drug users and they were not able obviously to change their client base, so the best proposal they could come up with was to build a brick wall around the children in the school yard," says Fionna Graham, advocate for Lorne Ave. Public School.

Ward 4 Councillor Stephen Orser believes there may yet be a solution to save the beloved school.

Orser says in order to save it, we must first destroy it -- or at least part of it.

"How would demolishing part of it save it? Reduce costs with a reduced building size and of course that also means that portion of the land could be sold off," says Orser.

Orser says he plans to ask the mayor and council to explore his latest idea to determine whether it's feasible.