We all knew there was going to be a second round of school closures. The School Committee made that clear following a consultant’s report that in response to declining enrollment, consolidation could save millions on the upkeep of aging buildings while resulting in a more efficient system.

But, as Warwick has witnessed, consolidation comes at a price. There’s the emotion of closing a school that has been a part of the community for so many years. There’s the loss of jobs. There’s the reconfiguration of districts displacing patterns of neighborhood children growing through a system of elementary, junior high, and senior high schools. With consolidation there’s often more students in each classroom, altering the student/teacher ratio and raising questions to the quality of education.

All of those issues and more were raised as the School Committee embarked on secondary school consolidation more than two years ago. An extended community debate over the condition of school buildings and the impact on the system preceded the committee’s decision to close Aldrich and Gorton Junior and Vets Senior High Schools. This year, after a summer of renovations, Vets opened as a junior high and students who would have otherwise attended Vets High went to Toll Gate and Pilgrim high schools.

The change has not come without problems as articulated mostly by teachers at Tuesday’s School Committee meeting. They gave accounts of insufficient supplies including classroom chairs, science labs which they claimed are unsafe, mold in classrooms, and classes where more than 50 percent of students have an IEP [individual education program] requiring special attention. Disturbing observations comparing the size of classes and classroom space between Vets and Winman junior highs were made that implied the system is rigged to offer greater opportunity to those students attending Winman. Such charges of inequity need to be investigated.

The litany of issues was long, which isn’t surprising seeing this is the first full week of a consolidated secondary school system. It wasn’t all the bad and the ugly, either. There was praise and applause for members of the WISE union, who perform school custodial and maintenance work and were shoulder-to-shoulder with contractors that replaced the floors in all four secondary school gymnasiums in addition to renovated auditoriums at Pilgrim and Vets and numerous other improvements.

And now we come to another round of consolidations – this time in elementary schools.

Unlike consolidation on the secondary level, the committee looking to close two elementary schools – as many as six schools were suggested by consultants initially – has meet behind closed doors. There has been no public debate over what schools are being considered for closure, and leading up to Tuesday’s meeting parents and teachers had only rumors to go by. Those rumors were confirmed with recommendations to close John Wickes and Randall Holden schools and re-purpose John Brown Francis School as the early childhood center at the end of the current academic year. Drum Rock, which currently serves as the childhood center, would be used to expand the nearby Warwick Area Career and Technical Center.

Warwick deserves more.

While selecting what schools to close rips into a community and, as we have seen, can become highly emotional and politicized, pitting neighborhoods against each other, the logic of the selections needs to be publicly articulated, debated, and defended. Anything less and we lose trust in those charged with running our schools and the system we depend on to educate our children.