It’s disappointing to read, in a story on page 1 this week, about the divide a $54.8 million school project is causing between the Scarborough School Board and Town Council.

If members of these two bodies don’t get together and work toward a project both the schools and taxpayers can support, this project would seem doomed to failure when it goes to voters this fall.

Many Scarborough residents live here because of the quality of the schools and therefore want to maintain that quality. But there’s more to the quality of schools than the bricks and mortar. Many parents and educators would actually rank that low on the list. More important are good teacher salaries and small class sizes.

Nonetheless, that support for Scarborough schools has, in the past, translated into support for school building projects in the voting booth, with residents approving several years ago the largest school project to be paid for with local tax dollars only. The construction of the new high school, however, had just about unanimous support from both town councilors and school board members. Placing a project on the ballot at nearly twice the cost of that project would be an extreme test of that support and would likely be rejected by voters.

The project the School Board is now proposing would include renovating and expanding the Middle School at a cost of $16.6 million. It would also include demolishing and rebuilding Wentworth Intermediate at a cost of $38.4 million.

There’s no arguing that both schools are in need of work. The Middle School has been overcrowded since the day it opened. Wentworth is an old building with a lot of problems, including leaky windows, faulty heating and poor air quality.

While the Middle School definitely needs to be expanded to accommodate the student population in Scarborough, tearing down and rebuilding Wentworth is far from a “no-brainer,” as School Board member David Beneman called it. The 43-year-old school certainly has its share of problems, but it’s obviously functional. If it weren’t, it would be a lot higher than No. 51 on the state’s list of schools that need assistance.

Even though it’s even lower on the list, the Middle School would seem to be the more pressing problem. The school already has seven portable classrooms housing students, with more to come if the town doesn’t add on to the existing school. With the cost of homes in Scarborough, first-time homebuyers aren’t moving here anymore. Families on their second and third homes are more likely, and that typically means children in middle and high school.

The plans for both of these schools also include air conditioning. That would cost $344,000 at the Middle School and $924,000 at Wentworth. That seems excessive in a state that has a few hot days at the very end and beginning of the school year. Yes, air conditioning is about more than staying cool; it’s about air quality. But the air quality at most schools throughout the state without air conditioning has sufficed just fine for decades.

In an ideal world, the town could replace both of these schools with beautiful, air-conditioned buildings, install artificial turf fields, build a senior center and double the size of the library. However, this isn’t an ideal world; it’s one that sometimes forces us to make decisions.

Those decisions are often best made by elected leaders who are intimately familiar with the details of the projects. In this case, that would mean when School Board members and town councilors sit down on June 14 in a workshop to review this project, they better be ready to get together and come up with a project they think voters can accept.

If they don’t, they will force voters to make a decision for them. At a $54 million price tag, voters would be forced to vote against a project so expensive they simply can’t afford it.

Brendan Moran, editor