St. Joseph’s worst kept secret was revealed at a very public meeting of the St. Joseph School District Board of Education on Monday.

District officials outlined plans to close four elementary schools, play dominoes with another elementary school and middle school, which would get a new home, and build two new elementary schools. The full details of the plan are in the Tuesday News-Press.

Readers also can expect a steady stream of stories on every angle of this story between now and when the district goes to voters for more money in roughly 14 months. That’s right, the district is going to need a chunk of money to make the plan work.

Taxpayers will be asked to renew the district’s temporary 63-cent operating levy passed in 2004 and boost the existing operating levy. Oh, yes, and the district will be asking voters to approve somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 million to $45 million in general obligation bonds to pay for the new construction. Nice neighborhood, huh?

Now here is the worst kept part of that secret: The district wants to build one of the new schools at Carden Park if the city will donate that land. (It will.) The district also has some kind of option on 10 acres of land off Karnes Road and just east of Interstate 29.

Both of these options have been floating through the community for months. I know I got calls. Nancy Hull, our education reporter, did too. But when she followed up with questions about both, district officials responded with variations on the theme of “How could you ask such a question? The board would have to discuss those kinds of things in public.”

Well, the board did. And within minutes, it approved the school administration’s basic outline of this dramatic plan.

The actual discussions that led to the plan apparently began just a couple of months after Superintendent Melody Smith took over in March 2006. A committee working on the district’s vision began meeting regularly in June 2006, the superintendent explained on Barry Birr’s radio talk show Tuesday morning.

“This is an extremely difficult conversation to have,” the superintendent told one of Mr. Birr’s regular callers. She added that no one ever enjoys talking about closing a school.

That’s an understatement. The last time the district talked about closing even one school — Neely Elementary — a full-scale crusade to keep Neely’s doors open was triggered. It worked.

Given that track record, it is probably understandable that the district would want to keep this plan under wraps until the last possible moment.

That doesn’t mean that the decision to put this plan together under the radar was either right or healthy. First, it is the job of the press to get the information in front of our readers. We happen to believe that a community discussion of a plan of this magnitude is more important during its creation than when it goes to voters as a take-it-or-leave-it proposal. For the record, we did try to get this information out.

Skeptics also will question the timing of the release of the plan after the filing for school board candidates has closed. This plan easily could have generated another half-dozen candidates to join the seven candidates already filed for the two board jobs up for a vote in April.

In their defense, the board and school administrators found themselves in a no-win situation. Put all of the information out, and the district may never have been able to forge a cohesive plan for the community. Put the plan out in one sudden release, and the plan can expect to take some shots from both voters and the press.

With this package not expected to hit the ballot before April 2009, fortunately, the school district has plenty of time to smooth ruffled feathers with the press and soothe the concerns of taxpayers. Candor, even belatedly, is the medication of choice in these situations.

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Darlene Adkins noticed. She is a faithful reader of this page and an even more faithful follower of the page’s Bible verse. She noticed that the new Debate page failed to include a Bible verse. Thankfully, she called, as did some other readers.

This page has been redesigned to feature more color, more pictures and bigger, more readable type for the lead editorials. We are still nudging a little here and there in effort to get more stories on the page, but the Bible verse will remain part of the package. Otherwise, we pray for your patience through this period of transition.

Debate editor Mark Sheehan can be reached at marks@npgco.com