Natchez-Adams School District leaders need to plow ahead with plans to begin rebuilding the district’s outdated and inefficient school buildings.

The rest of us need to help guide and support them as they work through the process.

Yes, building new school buildings may ultimately result in a tax increase. While we dislike raising taxes as much as the next person, the district has allowed the school buildings to simply fall into disrepair.

Most of the school district’s existing buildings date to the 1950s or 1960s.

The district’s building are like American cars of the 1950s trapped in a Cuban time warp. The buildings were built before air conditioning was commonplace, before the Internet existed, and they stand as uninspiring monuments to the past.

For Natchez-Adams schools to prosper and for our community to prospect, we must start treating public education with high importance.

Getting the school structures corrected and modernized is a step in that process, along with finding permanent, solid leadership in the superintendent’s office.

Interim Superintendent Fred Butcher seems to be working hard to get the ship righted, but many more hands will be required to lift it to greatness. Getting the facilities correct is a key part of that process, however.