A week and a half after members of the Board of Education for the Public Schools of Robeson County publicly committed to the need to close some schools as a part of consolidation, they came back with a nevermind — at least anytime soon.

We understand the need to close some schools, and strongly endorse it, but the pause by the school board might be prudent, assuming that it is just a pause and the effort gets rebooted.

We know that in those 10 days board members fielded a lot of expressions of outrage from folks angry that their community school was on a list of those that might be closed. Nowhere was that more pronounced than in the southern part of Robeson County, where South Robeson High, which has fewer than 500 students, was prominently mentioned. That sparked a petition drive that gathered more than 1,300 names in almost no time.

As we indicated before, a far larger worry for the Board of Education would have been if the public had shrugged its collective shoulders at the prospect of closing some schools. Apathy is a much bigger foe of what we all desire, and that is a meaner and leaner school system that does a better job of preparing our students for the rest of their lives.

Still, we hope the board’s decision was not because of pushback, but because a delay is necessary.

The school board, in punting, cited some very real concerns, including an overly aggressive timetable that included closing some schools before the start of the next school year, which is in August, and would require a rush job. More importantly, there remains uncertainty about how much money the system could receive either to build new schools or patch up existing ones.

That unknown is the greatest variable facing our school board. How can the board be expected to come up with a plan of how many schools this county will need and where they should be located for the coming decades without a solid knowledge of how many might be built and which ones renovated?

The board, instead, signaled that it would take a swipe at lower-hanging fruit, adjusting district lines and tightening the system’s transfer policy, as ways to bring some necessary balance into the population of individual schools.

According to school officials, about 2,000 of the 23,000-plus students in the system — about 9 percent of them — are attending a school out of their district, taking advantage of the system’s ask-and-you-will-receive policy. Requests now go to the central office, and they must be approved by the school board. As part of this fix, the central office should be asked to look on transfer requests with a more critical eye, and board members must resist the temptation to help out a constituent who might express appreciation on Election Day.

But the juiciest fruit would be the reworking of district lines that are 30 years old. That could be done dispassionately by a computer program that matches the number of students attending a school with the number that school is designed to accommodate. We can’t continue to have 800 students in a school designed for 650 when eight miles away a school designed for 650 has 500 students.

There is, to be sure, a lot of hard work and politically difficult decisions down the road. But in the short term, a lot of progress can be made by doing some of the easier work.