A grade of incomplete

Bostonians have been waiting since 2014 for the Walsh administration to come up with a detailed plan for addressing the city’s school building needs. They learned this week they’ll have to wait even longer — while another wave of Hub students attends school in antiquated buildings that in many cases fall short of acceptable standards.

Yes, these are tough decisions for Mayor Marty Walsh. School closings or consolidations or reconfigurations — choose the least-inflammatory term you’d like — always are, because even the worst schools have loyal defenders who want to keep them limping along.

But kicking the can down the road does a disservice both to students in Boston Public Schools — and to the taxpayers who are supporting the existing, inefficient system.

Walsh and his team have done a good job identifying the challenge — commissioning an audit of the 127 schools (two-thirds of them built before World War II), evaluating maintenance and repair needs for every building and discussing big-picture plans. Walsh has pledged to spend $1 billion on school buildings over the next 10 years. All fine and dandy. But that discussion began the day Walsh was sworn in. The actual to-do list is still lacking. The 230-page BuildBPS master plan, released yesterday, is rich with useful data and guiding principles, but does not contain specific recommendations on school consolidations, as some expected. Instead it represents a blueprint to guide the long-term effort to transform the city’s school buildings. Final decisions on buildings themselves won’t come until after even more community input.

And in that drawn-out process some see the influence of election-year politics. After all what candidate wants to defend an unpopular (but necessary) school closure on the campaign trail?

In his State of the City address last month Walsh urged Bostonians to accept that “better buildings and grade configurations means changing the status quo.” Until Walsh makes some tough decisions the status quo is what these kids are left with, and that’s simply not good enough.