PORTSMOUTH — As someone who takes an active interest in community affairs, Chris Carceller says she has attended those School Committee meetings where “all we talk about is the money.”

“Right now we’re just trying to keep up with what we’ve got. It’s not enough,” she told fellow residents on Friday.

“If we have a vision for what we want, we will work toward it. The budgeting will fall into place,” she said.

Carceller was one of several volunteers who helped get some 65 people to commit two days of their time, Friday and yesterday, toward crafting common goals for the schools 10 years from now.

The participants represented a broad array of governmental, political, social and community organizations — some of the very same groups that have clashed bitterly over school financing in the last 2½ years.

With schools across Rhode Island girding for bleak budgets in the worst economic slide since the Great Depression, there is no better time to take a long-range view, say key people involved in the event, which concluded yesterday afternoon at the Hathaway Elementary School.

The conference was not geared to focus on financing but to “lay the groundwork and set the tone” for a community to come together and solve problems in a way that is “inclusive and respectful,” said Janice Williams, a professional facilitator based in New Hampshire, who guided the two-day event.

In Portsmouth, as elsewhere, the schools in recent years have become a lightning rod for divisiveness, particularly as financial fortunes have worsened.

In 2006, the taxpayer group Portsmouth Concerned Citizens orchestrated a special Financial Town Meeting in which a small minority of voters cut $1.1 million from the school budget. Months later, the School Committee sued the town, winning a Superior Court order that resulted in a supplemental property tax of nearly $575,000.

Since then, there has been “some healing,” said E. Richard Carpender, the School Committee chairman.

“But there are some differences of opinion on where [the schools] need to go,” he said.

Carpender said he hopes the conference “brings everyone into the fold.”

Carceller spoke within one of eight small group discussions that continued throughout the day Friday.

Jane Calhoun, a representative of the Glen Manor House Authority, agreed with Carceller that a cooperative approach is essential.

The plan will work as a real guide for the future if there is “trust in the community and [broad] participation” in developing it, Calhoun said.

Gloria Schmidt, a representative of the Portsmouth Historical Society, said that “it is important to find the things that unite us.”

“There are many more things that unite us,” she said. “Sometimes it’s just the details that divide us.”

Carceller, Calhoun and Schmidt all sat at the same table with Joseph Lorenz, a representative from Portsmouth Concerned Citizens.

Lorenz said, “A lot of people think we want to cut off money from people.”

But the organization’s true goal is to make sure taxpayers’ money is used “effectively and efficiently,” he said.

He said he felt the conference would give him and the PCC great insight into the running of the schools.

A steering committee drawn from participants of the conference will shape the results into a proposal for a strategic plan that will be submitted to the School Committee.

gmacris@projo.com