Closing a school acknowledges a difficult reality: There is no longer a student base large enough to justify the money spent to keep a school open.

State officials now confront the harshest budgetary constraints they've faced in decades, which makes solving the problem of low school enrollment urgent. This is not an issue that can be punted into endless debate.

The Department of Education has settled on a rational approach to tackle this painful but crucial task. Officials are studying school consolidations by breaking the review into three batches, starting with areas with schools that are known to be operating under capacity. This first batch includes schools such as Wailupe Valley Elementary, which has only 78 students.

It makes sense to begin the discussion with these campuses. In this way, the decision-makers may be able to settle more quickly on the future for schools that are clearly the most underpopulated.

Responsibility for studying potential closures will rest with administrators for school complexes, assisted by task forces they will appoint. That's not ideal — the state superintendent would have been able to consider a broader range of options, across district boundaries, and should have been at the helm of this process. But the review in any case will include testimony from the community, which will provide a better understanding of the impact on students, parents and staff.

In addition to giving people a way to vent their emotional response, this review should elicit creative ideas for an economically sustainable way to use tax-funded school facilities.

Most of those school communities surely will make the case for keeping their school intact. But in doing so, they should recognize the economic circumstances that will ultimately compel that a tough decision to close some schools will have to be made. The administration and, ultimately, the school board deserves support in making the hard call in these cases.

And these closures, enacted with care, can improve overall efficiencies of the school system, averting the need for further cuts in services delivered at the classroom level. Maintaining the quality of services to children — not maintaining the brick and mortar of the schools themselves — should be the bottom line.