It is really hard to watch Holyoke Mayor Joshua Garcia and School Superintendent Anthony Soto cheer for the construction of one new middle school when so many of us know what we lost. We know the damage one middle school will cause to our children’s education.

But, I think city leaders are not cheering for a new school at all. They are not cheering for our children or our teachers. They are cheering for the fact they don’t have to raise taxes.

We shouldn’t fool ourselves. Building one new middle school was never about improving our school system. It was never about improving our children’s education. It was always about saving money.

This is the problem you have when your city leaders think like accountants instead of public servants.

Ironically, though, building one new middle school will cost millions more than what we would have been paying when we proposed two.

In 2019, we had a deal to build two middle schools at about $66 million apiece. Yet, we are now paying $85.5 million to build just one. That is an increase of nearly $20 million.

That’s the deal Holyoke’s leaders are giddy about.

Moreover, when we proposed building two schools, the Massachusetts School Building Authority agreed to take on the construction costs of one entire school. That’s right, the state was going to give us $75.8 million, paying the full cost of the construction of one school, while giving us another $9 million to pay for the second.

We would have been left with a bill of $57.6 million, which we would not have even started to pay for three years, giving us time to bring that cost down even more.

In the end, for the construction of two 21st-century middle schools, a homeowner of an average-sized house would have paid about 75 cents a day.

For less than the cost of a cup of coffee, we would have been able to educate all of our middle school students in small, state-of-the-art buildings.

At the time, educators said two small middle schools would have gone a long way toward meeting the needs of our most at-risk children. They were hoping to create an infrastructure that would work toward keeping these children in school. In 2022 alone, more than 50 students dropped out of our high schools. We wanted to fix this.

Yet, we turned down the deal.

Instead, we have a project that costs more for less and creates inequity for students. Our current deal means only some of our middle school students will be in the new school. Because we only have one new school, we can’t fit all of our middle school students in it.

This means students at Lt. Clayre P. Sullivan Middle School will stay where they are.

These students will be educated in a building constructed in 1961. They will be in a building that has not been fully renovated since 1989.

So, while one group of students is educated in a subpar building, another group will be educated in a 21st-century school. This is the inequity we are creating. As one parent told me recently, school leaders create problems they are unable to fix later.

The new building will have new science labs and art rooms and communal classrooms and improved air quality and improved lighting. The new building will have all the accouterments of a better education. Sullivan, which doesn’t even have a library, will look like a school built 60 years ago. How will the district decide which students will receive a better education?

This is the problem we created, and no one wants to talk about it.

My wife and I are already talking about pulling our youngest child out of Holyoke’s public schools before he is forced into a second-rate building for a second-rate education.

I know I am not alone. Many parents are making plans to leave Holyoke’s public schools.

I can’t blame them.

Yet, it is sad because it did not have to be this way.

We had a good thing. We had a great plan to educate all our children.

The state was ready to fund us at a historic amount.

But our citizens were unwilling to pay the amount of a cup of coffee to pay for those schools.

I wish we had leaders who were brave enough to call the public out about this. I wish they were honest about what we lost.

Instead, they put a little lipstick on a pig and say it’s beautiful. It’s not.

I wish we could talk honestly about what we lost.

We need to address the fact that we have a large population of mostly white, middle-class Holyokers who are unwilling to pay for making real improvements to our schools and city.

Until we talk about this, we will just have to keep pretending.

We will just have to keep smiling and clapping, while refusing to look at the damage we are causing.

Patrick O’Connor is a writer and public school teacher who lives in Holyoke.