Difficult times call for difficult choices; but every now and then, public boards such ours, the Cascade Union Elementary School District Board of Trustees, are presented not only with the need to cut spending but are given opportunities to reposition the district to be stronger for the future.

These hard economic times have done just that.

Faced with financial hits from Sacramento year after year, our district at first answered blow for blow with ways to respond to receiving less and less money. Eventually, the places to cut dried up.

For the past two years, it has felt to me like our district was reduced to standing against the ropes in defensive cover, waiting for some magical bell to ring that would call an end to this round of the fight.

Looking at the state’s finances and looking at the sluggish local economy, I think all of us — as the members of the Cascade school board — have realized that waiting for the bell to ring is a fantasy. There is no magic end to our current budget reality.

Even while the district has been pushed against the ropes, the employees of this district have endured bravely — educating, cooking, driving, maintaining our offices and classrooms and answering phones and questions.

They are to be commended. We in Anderson are blessed to have such caring people serving the needs of our children.

In this endless boxing match, however, I am convinced that our district needs to stand up and take some swings back at the state’s messages of fewer dollars, more restrictions, and demands for ever higher achievement from federal regulations.

The Cascade district now needs to chart its own course, to assess how best to live within the ever-shrinking dollars that Sacramento promises but often hesitates to send.

We need to make our schools once again the pride of our city.

The board of trustees, after considering the continued decline in enrollment and the large disparity in sizes for our K-5 school sites, has come to understand that now is the most opportune time to move to a different model of providing services to all of our grade levels.

At its January meeting, the board will consider vacating Verde Vale Elementary School and reconfiguring the remaining school sites as grade-level focus sites so that students in the primary grades will all be enrolled at one site, intermediate students will be moved to another site and the newly-remodeled middle school will continue to serve the upper grades.

This design will allow for more teacher collaboration at each of the grade levels and gives the district the advantage of better staffing without resorting to bunching students into combination classes of perhaps 12 first-graders and 15 second-graders at multiple school sites.

Moving to this mode of schools has proven extremely successful for many of our state’s school districts. Locally, one needs only to look south at the Cottonwood Union School District and the Evergreen Union School District or north to Pacheco and Columbia School Districts. In each of these districts, parent satisfaction is high, teacher satisfaction with the grade level centers is high and student achievement — as measured through standardized test scores and the Academic Performance Indexes for their schools — have moved to enviable levels.

In the short term, consolidating school sites will be uncomfortable for students, parents and teachers.

We understand that. Parents and kids identify with particular school sites, look forward to advancing from one teacher to the next and there is a certain ease to having all of one’s children at a particular site rather than spread among up to three different school sites.

As parents, none of us wants to think that our children are merely chess pieces to be moved from one spot to another just to make even and neat sets.

Exciting things can happen, though, if we focus our grade-level staff resources and pool creativity.

The board of trustees has an obligation to make the transition and implementation as bump-free as possible. If the board votes for the reconfiguration, it is committed to the training, the site modifications and the support needed to make the changes.

There will be cost-savings from the shift that will allow us to fund other needed programs and restore some services for our children.

It is probable that the Verde Vale site will continue to serve area students through the establishment of an independent K-8 charter school there; a charter petition is scheduled to be presented at the January meeting as well.

Expanding quality educational options for our community’s students makes our city more attractive to potential new employers and to home-seekers. Our district’s staff welcomes the opportunity to introduce healthy competition into the educational ‘marketplace’ if the charter school ends up at that site. Citizens of the North State have largely given up on the notion that the solutions to our problems will come from Sacramento or Washington. We need to craft our own successes.

While I can respect the desire to look back to the nostalgia of what our own school experiences were when Anderson was a thriving mill town and ranching center, we owe it to our children — indeed, we owe it to ourselves — to adapt our methods and our school sites with a vision for the future.

[Editor’s Note: The views expressed in this editorial are his own and do not reflect the board’s collective thinking nor its future actions.]