On Monday night, the Ripon Area Board of Education will hold a special meeting on buying land for a future site for a middle or high school.

There are no public reports as to where the land being discussed is located. The Ripon Area School District owns 35 acres of land near Murray Park Elementary School, which the Ripon Commonwealth Press is only large enough for a middle-school building.

Before the school board votes on a land purchase — which will require voter approval — and certainly before the school board starts considering where to build a new middle and/or high school, the school board needs to consider two major factors.

The first is the accessibility of a site near Murray Park that would be accessible primarily from Eureka Street. It took having children attending Murray Park and Quest Elementary School, as well as playing baseball at Murray Park, to see the regularly scheduled traffic tie-up at the four-way stop at Eureka and Oshkosh streets. That snarl is made worse by employees leaving Bremner Foods at about the same time that students are leaving Murray Park.

Four-way stops are the worst kind of intersection traffic control. How many drivers know the correct order for traffic to go through a four-way stop? (Few,  based on observation.) The design produces more pollution from idling vehicles. Because they require all traffic to stop, they also waste the only truly, provably nonrenewable resource — time.

The best alternative from a safety and time perspective, installing a roundabout, is highly unlikely given the size of the intersection, the adjacent properties, and the public unpopularity of roundabouts. As it is, any intersection improvement will require state Department of Transportation approval. Having the Ripon Police Department direct traffic at that intersection between, say, 3:15 and 3:45 p.m. doesn’t seem like a good use of resources given that students are going from school to home all over the city at that time.

All of those facts suggest that any school construction on Ripon’s north side is a bad idea. Another reason should influence any school construction proposal anywhere in Ripon.

The Ripon Area School District has three school districts to the west — Green Lake, Markesan and Princeton — whose long-term viability is in question for a combination of reasons. None of those school districts are growing in enrollment or in population. And yet they all face the costs that could be lumped together into the term “overhead” — paying administrators, maintaining buildings and buying supplies — that is not decreasing, particularly as the federal and state governments pile on more mandates, usually unfunded, onto schools. Smaller school districts also are less able to provide the kind of student programming larger (to a point) school districts can provide.

Wisconsin has 3,120 units of government — counties, cities, villages, towns, school districts and other governmental bodies. Only Illinois has more. That many governmental bodies in a relatively small state population-wise is not a formula for governmental efficiency, and it’s certainly not a formula for wise use of our tax dollars. Some future Legislature will figure that out and will use a carrot and/or stick to make school districts merge, or combine cities or villages with adjoining townships.

The way to prevent getting hit by the state stick is to take the initiative. The school district should approach its smaller neighbors to the west and discuss whether a merger might create better educational opportunities for students of the school districts while costing the taxpayers of those school districts less than now. That discussion needs to take place sooner rather than later because school district geography should influence where future school buildings, particularly a high school, are built.