LEWISTON — Robert Giguere toured the middle school from top to bottom.

He looked over the tiny lockers, the exposed wires and the bathroom stalls that were missing doors.

He walked through the cramped cafeteria and inspected classrooms with old slate chalkboards and windows that won’t open.

He saved his assessment until the end of the tour and then delivered it in a frank way.

“Somebody dropped the ball,” he said. “Somebody goofed.”

It wasn’t the first time Giguere went up and down the stairs and hallways at the middle school. He was a student there in the 1950s. He returned to the school to teach, and remained there until 1984.

Now, school officials want in excess of $9 million to fix the school. What does Giguere think of that?

“It’s not so much about the $9 million,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s going to become $14 million, instead. What if they find asbestos in there, or something else?”

Voters will decide in a July 10 referendum whether to spend $9.1 million to repair the building that was constructed in 1930.

School officials say the building is crumbling and outdated. It’s dingy and cramped and not fit for the 700-plus students who go to classes there each year.

In Giguere’s opinion, it didn’t have to come to this.

“They didn’t do any upkeep at all,” he said. “Now they want to catch up all at once. They want one big bite of the apple.”

School officials invited residents into the building Thursday so they could make up their minds about whether to approve the spending. For many, it was as much a trip down memory lane as it was a fact-finding mission.

“It even smells the same,” one woman said.

Beverly Giguere, Robert’s wife, stood in the middle of one classroom on the first floor. She looked at the desks, the chalkboard and the ceiling with a faraway smile on her face.

“I think,” she said, “that this was a typing room when I went here.”

Her husband, meanwhile, was down the hall staring into a room full of gym equipment.

“I spent a lot of time in here,” he said. “It used to be health class. There used to be a skeleton we called Squiggy.”

They even toured the bathrooms, agreeing that not much had changed over the decades. But according to School Committee member Linda Scott, the bathrooms are a problem. Some stalls don’t have doors. Some bathrooms feel dirty no matter how much they’re cleaned. Privacy is an issue.

“That’s important if you’re a 13-year-old girl,” Scott said. “A lot of them say they don’t use the bathrooms at all. They wait until it’s time to go home.”

The cafeteria seems to be in good shape, but school officials say it is not big enough to accommodate the number of students who eat there. Last year, they had three lunch periods to accommodate them all. In the future, they might have to increase that to four.

“I don’t think we had a cafeteria at all,” said Scott Giguere, who went to the middle school in the 1970s. “We had lunch in our rooms, as I remember it.”

The construction work, if approved, would give the school 10 more classrooms, new bathrooms and a larger cafeteria. The front offices would be moved downstairs, and a larger library would be moved to the center of the building. The building would get more efficient heating and ventilation systems.

Construction would not begin until the summer of 2013. The bond would be paid for by local property taxpayers. City officials estimated it would cost about $25 a year on a Lewiston home valued at $100,000.

One man who came for the tour spent a lot of time looking over the areas of concerns. When he got to the cafeteria, he expected it to be in worse shape, he said. Asked how he felt about the request for $9.1 million of taxpayer money for repairs, he was unable to give a definitive answer.

“It needs work,” he said, “definitely.”

Nine-million dollars worth?

He shrugged and said no more.

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