With seven different “scenarios” that envision a future when the Butler School District has shuttered its only middle school building, it is not hard to imagine how the next round of school consolidation will go.

A century-old building needing an estimated $20 million in repairs and upgrades is not a good candidate to survive a consolidation project at a school system that has experienced years of declining enrollment.

“The quality of instruction in the classroom and the leadership of principals is far more important than any of the physical changes to schools,” Superintendent Brian White said at a recent public forum.

The district’s fifth and sixth grade students currently attend Butler Middle School. Closing the school would require a plan to send those students to other buildings, like keeping fifth graders in elementary schools for another year, putting sixth graders at the intermediate high school (and ninth graders at the senior high school) or keeping students in the elementary school buildings through sixth grade.

“I don’t know that there is a big desire to go back to kindergarten through sixth,” school board Chairman Nina Teff said. “People seem to want to keep some kind of middle school concept.”

Regardless of the plan, closing a school building — especially one that’s been used for a century — is a controversial decision for not only students and their parents, but for the communities that are suddenly left with a vacant building.

The Butler School District is dealing with declining enrollment and the need to concentrate the resources that it has on the students who still attend school in the district. Even though the school system’s enrollment appears to have leveled off, for the future, we can’t imagine the school system growing again — and certainly not enough to justify spending money on the middle school building.

School consolidations are all about the effort to match the number of buildings to the number of students. In the last round of school closings, elementary schools were targeted.

If, or more likely when, Butler Middle School is closed, the challenge will be to find out how to use the district’s remaining school buildings to the best advantage. Does it make sense to keep fifth graders in elementary schools? What about sixth graders? How about some elementary school buildings with kindergarten through fourth grade and other buildings with fifth and sixth grade students?

No changes are going to please everyone, especially when the end result is closing buildings, but we’re encouraged that the Butler School District is asking parents how they want the probable closing of the middle school to affect the lives of district students going forward.