School closures are over and everthing went the way we wanted. We can relax, right?

Wrong.

West Seattle's representative on the Seattle school board told reporter Rebekah Schilperoort (story, Page 1) that the hardest part of considering school closures was realizing that school communities "are really affected." Irene Stewart said the changes have not come to an end in West Seattle.

". . . there will will at least one more school that will close in my district and I am committed to seeing that through," said board member Irene Stewart.

Will that be Genesee where Pathfinder has been housed. No one doubts that Genesee has reached the end of its productive life. It is old, worn out and not worth the cost of rehabilitating it.

That being the case, where will the Pathfinder program go? Parents of the children in the native American-oriented program have warded off two attempts to move Pathfinder out of Genesee. What will those parents do next?

It would be easy to suggest that the reason Pathfinder was was not moved to Cooper School last year and to the old Boren Middle School this time was because they complained louder and more effecively than parents in other schools.

True, the Pathfinder group were noisy about the potential moves. They were organized and focused. When one parent leader last year suggested Cooper School students should not be dispersed to other schools so that Pathfinder could take over, that parent was quickly "reintegrated" into the majority.

This time parents made a spirited objection to the huge old Boren school. Letters poured into this newspaper, parent were present in numbers at meetings, expressing their distaste for merging with other programs and suggesting, somewhat surprisingly, that they wanted the program to stay small. Again, they convinced Superintendent Raj Manhas and the program stays - for now - at Genesee.

Some suggesting the Pathfinder program stayed because of political pressure worked at the school district, that they shouted their way into getting their own way.

But that would be simplistic. A group of equally well organized and adamant parents at Viewlands in Ballard were unsuccessful in a protest about moving their inclusive autism program.

Let us hope the Pathfinder parents will embrace reality and work with the district for an amicable solution to their physical plant problems.

Maybe Genesee will be that "one more school that will close" that Irene Stewart mentioned.

It is obvious that the falling enrollment of the Seattle school district means we can no longer support 70 elementary schools and the sooner the cuts are made the quicker we can get back to the primary job of educating our children better than is the case today.