Behind the reddish metal locker doors of Donegal High School lies ... not much.

Maybe a few books. A pen. An indie pop poster or two.

But many of the compartments lining the hallways of the otherwise jam-packed school are vacant.

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The paradox is easily explainable, said senior Joel Keefer, of Marietta.

At class changes, the halls are so filled with humanity there's no time or room to fight your way to a locker.

According to Keefer, a lot of kids end up lugging their gear around all day.

They tote it to the cafeteria, where they eat in four shifts, starting at 10:25 a.m.

To reach the 14 modular classrooms, snug up against the school, they cut through a parking lot crunchy with ice-melt crystals.

When it's raining or snowing, Mount Joy senior Abby Hoover said, "All your stuff gets wet."

Such lessons in fortitude are set to continue in the foreseeable future.

Residents nixed a January referendum that would have incurred $114 million of debt to pay for a new high school, a new Maytown Elementary School and to renovate three other buildings.

The referendum, broadly backed by school officials and school board members, hotly divided district residents.

In the end, said Donegal High Principal John L. Felix Jr., sticker shock soundly defeated the plan.

Those on both sides of the fence agree something must be done. But, in this drum-tight economy, nobody knows exactly what. Or when.

School board members vowed at a Feb. 10 meeting to involve the community in creating a new ballot question.

Meanwhile, Maytown Principal Sharon Hagenberger said, more and more kids will flood into the district as the population grows.

The question is: How long can the schools keep up with it all?

Maytown, a single-story building that opened as Abraham Lincoln was taking office in 1861, had to be temporarily shut down last month after a steam leak heated a closet wall to 200 degrees.

The electrical system is at its limit, added Hagenberger. "Our teachers have been warned not to [plug in] a fan because it could blow a circuit."

In December, rainwater leaking through the roof evicted the principal from her office.

"You can see here the paper over the plaster is all peeled," she said, peering overhead. "They've been concerned about the ceiling dropping."

Maytown Live
A recent visit to Maytown Elementary School and Donegal High School in Mount Joy turned up a bittersweet contradiction.

The undersized classrooms are indeed bursting at the seams. But the schools have incubated generations of scholars. The buildings are a little like eccentric old friends.

On a crisp, cold Thursday, the 100th day of the school year, Hagenberger led the way down hardwood-decked halls to an intimate, dimly lit gym.

The bleachers were beautifully fashioned out of wood.

"The movie studios would love to have this gym," Hagenberger said. On the other hand, the kids would love to have a regulation-size space.

In the hallway, students' books were scattered along the baseboards and a rummage sale of winter coats hung from wooden pegs.

Kids whirled past Hagenberger and swiveled their faces upward in greeting.

"We have people everywhere," she said.

Hagenberger said she started noticing the crush in 2005.

Based on state guidelines, Maytown should accommodate 250 students, the principal said. It now has about 294.

The trend is ever upward.

The school had added four more students just the day before. Next year, two of the fifth-grade classes will be shifted to Riverview Elementary School to make way for an additional fourth-grade class and an art room.

Hagenberger exited the building and traversed an outside walkway leading to a neighboring 1929 structure.

In Linda Good's fourth-grade class, the alphabet posted on the wall contained just 22 letters — there wasn't room for the rest.

The letters are like the kids, Good said. "We have to share and squish in."

Because asbestos in the walls makes it impractical to drill and mount new equipment, Good added, she used a window blind as a projection screen until recently.

Art classes are being taught in the 1950s cafeteria this year.

Art teacher Lauren Ernst, who was sitting at a table in the cafeteria, gestured toward a nearby maintenance room.

"That's my office right there, which I share with the custodian," said Ernst, who has been teaching seven years. "I feel like I could do better for the kids if I had a classroom."

Still, Ernst and other staff members say students love the old school and are getting a good education.

Test results listed online by the nonprofit education advocacy group, Great Schools Partnership Inc., show Maytown kids achieving above-average scores in most 2008 Pennsylvania System of School Assessment categories.

Fifth-grade reading and writing scores were below average.

Maytown's small-town sense of community, increasingly rare in 2009 America, is strong, Hagenberger said.

"Two-thirds of my students are walkers," the principal noted.

This lucky transportation phenomenon saves the district more than $100,000 a year in busing expenses, she said.

And it enables students to easily swing by for extra-curricular activities, such as Maytown Live, the school TV station.

"I know what we have here is working." But Hagenberger said it could work better with a new school.

Under the referendum proposal, the 1929 portion of the school would have been demolished and a new, Americans With Disabilities Act-compliant structure built on the site.

The project would have accounted for a total of $14 million of the project money, Hagenberger said.

"The referendum vote was disappointing to Linda and I especially," she said.

"We don't need a Cadillac," Linda Good said. "But we need a Chevy that is going to start every day."

Little school on the prairie
Unlike Maytown, Donegal High has two classrooms devoted to art.

They're in a modular building that has air conditioning, but no running water.

Trekking around the back of the main high school building, with farm fields falling away to the side, art students tote in five-gallon buckets of water to clean their brushes.

"It's like ... 'Little House on the Prairie,' " Principal Felix said.

He sketched the history of the long brick building that stands on the southern outskirts of Mount Joy.

Built for $1.6 million and opened for the 1954-55 school year, Donegal High was created by the then-controversial strategy of combining schools in Mount Joy, Marietta and Maytown.

The building originally accommodated about 750 pupils in grades seven through 12.

Now, Felix said, about 815 students tread the polished linoleum. The 2009 graduating class is the biggest since a wave of baby boom students crested in the mid-1970s.

Felix said he believes the referendum was "the right thing to do."

Had it passed, he added, a new high school would have been built across the road and opened as early as 2011-12. The 1950s facility would have been converted to a junior high school for grades seven and eight.

The design, by Crabtree, Rohrbaugh & Associates, would have housed 1,200 students.

Donegal High's appearance has changed little over the years.

"I had the class of 1958 here in the summer," Felix remarked. "It was like walking back in time."

The school's electrical and sewage systems are strained, the principal added. Three of the classrooms leak when it rains hard, and storage space is limited, as evidenced by the folding tables stacked in one of the lesser-used stairwells.

But the main problem is what Felix calls "pinch points."

They form during period changes, announced these days by electronic beeps.

On a recent day, a rapidly rising tide of students poured out of classrooms and surged through the green-tiled halls.

At fourth-period lunch, kids stood in a long line to buy pizza dippers and spaghetti and meatballs.

They dined church-picnic style, elbow-to-elbow at tables mounted on rollers.

They had half an hour.

The din was impressive, the mood dizzily upbeat. Apparently, it wasn't easy to repress the teenage exuberance.

"On the whole," Felix said, "I've got some good kids."

They don't complain about their too-small school, he added. "It's all they've known. It's normal to them."

School spirit remains high, according to Joel Keefer, the Donegal senior.

"It's a really tight group of people," Keefer said, referring to the social cohesion of the community.

But he's well aware of the impacts of crowding.

His class sizes have swelled from about 20 students when he was a freshman to 30 now, he said. "You don't get as much one-on-one" with teachers.

He nevertheless praised the staff. So did classmate Abby Hoover.

"I still think I'm getting a good education," Hoover reflected. "I wouldn't say I've been cheated."

Generations of her family have graduated from Donegal, she added.

But that doesn't mean the high school will be able to continue processing more and more students year after year, without change.

"It's just a hassle to fight your way through" the congested passages of the aging building, Hoover said.

"It's had its time."