But there’s now an understandable community uncertainty about proposed building plans, once $30 million and now closer to $80 million.

It was always useful to explore what we’re teaching and how and why before designing, and asking taxpayers to finance, more buildings. You don’t talk to architects before you know whether you want to build a courthouse or an outhouse. A community committee, and the school board, addressed some of those issues.

There are educational innovations that cut costs and space needs while improving the quality of education. Why haven’t we evaluated and used them? Presumably there are good explanations. But they’ve yet to be fully articulated.

Community confidence has been shaken. While we’re rebuilding it here are four documents, once merely useful but now essential.

1. What are we doing in this District with regard to pedagogy, academics, curriculum, and teaching methods, and why?

What are we not doing – like cluster schools, magnet schools, sending more seniors to Kirkwood or the University of Iowa, a dual language program like West Liberty? Why? We needn’t be defensive about what we're not doing. But we do need to acknowledge and explain it.

How would we know if we’d been “successful”? What are the academic goals, and what do we measure to see if we’re meeting them?

Some of this has already been done. Some has not. Once done it all needs to be put in one, cohesive document.

Such a foundation document has to tell our story warts and all. Slick boosterism will be self-defeating.

2. A separate inquiry and document need to address how our present physical structures reflect and support what we do.

Why are all our elementary school classrooms designed for roughly the same size classes? What alternative designs work elsewhere? Why did we initially build, and now want to expand, such huge high schools when most professionals say size is the problem?

If there were fewer students in the high schools there would be less pressure to build even larger ones. And yet, contrary to the recommendations of the National Commission on the High School Senior Year, many of our high school teachers oppose the idea of more university classes, or job shadowing, for seniors.

Presumably these educational and building practices also can be convincingly explained. But they need to be. Especially when resistance to change carries an $80 million price tag.

3. Having done 1 and 2, the district is then -- and only then, if it is to be rational, logical and responsible -- in a position to say, "Do you buy what we're doing and why (no. 1), and our logic in designing the physical plant in the way we have (no. 2)? If so, you can see from these enrollment projections that this is a logical design of the additional physical plant we shortly will need.”

4. Finally, the district needs a "long range planning document." No one can know what the student population will be, where it will be living, and how it will be learning, 20 to 50 years from now. No board and administration can bind their successors to the details of such a plan.

What parents, developers and other district stakeholders do have a right to expect, and what a board and administration can provide, is some indication of the guidelines that they think, now, should be used in the future when making those decisions.

Let's ask: “School clusters can optimize school occupancy, equalize class sizes, and minimize new building, without disrupting students. Are there any circumstances in which you’d use them?”

“When, if ever, should a school be closed?” “What if the growth shifts to the east?”

Four documents. Lots of questions. And answers.

The misfortunate handling of the buildings proposal can be salvaged. But it  now requires more than the blind faith of the citizenry.

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Nicholas Johnson was a local school board member, and K-12 issues newspaper columnist 1998-2001. He teaches at the Iowa College of Law.