Administrators and board members of both Vashon Island School District (VISD) and Vashon Park District (VPD) stumbled last week when they announced they were considering terminating a community-minded agreement called “Vashon Commons,” and replacing it, in part, with a website named “Facilitron.”

At a school board meeting, VISD Superintendent Slade McSheehy described three meetings held, beginning last fall, that led to this proposal. Still, the news came as a surprise to some stakeholders in the community for whom Vashon Commons was first created more than 30 years ago.

The interlocal agreement between VPD and VISD, first reached in 1987, has been a good thing, giving the public very low-cost access to public spaces. Almost everyone on Vashon has benefited in some way from it, including sports clubs, local theater groups, musicians, presenters and everyday islanders. The agreement brings the greater public into the facilities they have generously supported with levy dollars. Parks employees have been the main point of contact for users, explaining the rules, opening and closing the facilities and personally troubleshooting the vast array of potential hiccups along the way.

It has been a human-powered, locally-driven collaboration that worked.

But now, VISD proposes to replace it, in part, with Facilitron, a California-based for-profit enterprise that describes itself as ​​a “data-driven facility management platform” that “streamlines facility scheduling and rental requests for schools, colleges, and cities, enabling insight into real-time cost and utilization data. Facilitron school district and municipality partners benefit from a central facility management, scheduling, payment, and maintenance system that improves efficiency and increases transparency.”

That’s a lot of tech jargon, but we recognize that last word — transparency. Because that’s the problem with all this. It is a breach of trust — not to mention a big public relations blunder at the 11th hour of a school levy campaign — for our elected officials and highly paid public servants to even consider terminating the Commons without gathering extensive input from a wide array of community users.

Representatives of Facilitron will attend the next school board meeting, scheduled for Feb. 10. If you care about access to the public buildings on Vashon, you should too — the proposal now seems to be on a fast track, with a “first read” of a motion to terminate the relationship formed by Vashon Commons that could be voted on at the March 10 meeting.

McSheehy, at the Jan. 27 board meeting, touted a “seamless” transition to the new system, which he said would provide a “similar, or even enhanced” user experience.

But how much does he know about that experience, without first holding talks with stakeholders?

At the same meeting, VISD board vice-chair Toby Holmes, who attended some of the meetings that led to the proposal, earnestly described the Vashon Commons agreement as “a document and an agreement that a lot of people in the community worked very hard to create with a common goal in mind, and there is a lot of personal investment that people have to the success of it.”

If he truly honors that creation, why, then, did he not insist that these all-important stakeholders be more informed and consulted about such a significant change? Did any concerns about the passage of the schools’ levy factor into the timing of a broader announcement of these plans?

And why does the district even want to take on another program — managing the use of its buildings in off-hours — when it should be laser-focused, now more than ever, on educating its students?

These are questions not only for McSheehy and Holmes, but everyone else involved in this process, to answer before going any further with their plans.