Alumni who want to keep Portland’s Salt Institute for Documentary Studies open will get their first chance to present their case Wednesday in a meeting with current board members.

At least four members of the alumni-based group Save Salt are expected to be at the meeting. The group formed about three weeks ago, just days after Salt board members announced the 42-year-old professional development school on Congress Street would close in September. Board members cited declining enrollments, a lack of an endowment and a lack of consistent fundraising. The school doesn’t give college credits and typically enrolled 25 students a semester. Tuition is $9,890.

Members of Save Salt want the board to postpone the closing of Salt, including the selling off of property and equipment, to give them time to come up with a plan to run the school in a financially sustainable way.

“Our principal goal (in meeting the board) is to get them to slow down the dissolution of the organization and present them with our ideas for a way forward,” said Elyssa East, a member of the group who went to Salt in 1997 and now teaches writing at New York University. “We’d like to have it put into hibernation mode, while we address the points board members have said helped them decide to close it.”

Those points, East said, include a lack of funding and difficulty in marketing and outreach. East said the group, which includes a “small but committed army” of about 30 Salt alumni and community members, needs to gather more information about Salt’s current financial picture before offering concrete plans. East is coming from New York for the meeting and said that at least three other Save Salt members plan to be there. Other alumni will join the meeting by phone.

The meeting is scheduled to be held at Goodwill Industries of Northern New England on Washington Avenue, East said.

Kimberly Curry, the current Salt board chair, works at Goodwill. Curry declined to say what steps, if any, have been taken so far to dismantle Salt or whether the board might slow the shutdown process, as Save Salt members want.

“We’re just having a conversation,” said Curry of the scheduled meeting. “There might be other meetings.”

Send questions/comments to the editors.