It is no secret, and in fact is a painful reality, that the Wake County commissioners, who control the purse strings for the public schools, and members of the school board have been in a frequent state of agitation with each other. That's risky for students who need solid, unified community support for the school system. So a fresh idea from the Wake Education Partnership and the Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce is to be taken seriously.

The proposal would give commissioners responsibility for planning facilities, buying the land for them, building them and maintaining them. Those tasks currently fall under the school board's leadership. Another part of the idea, tempting to the school board, is a funding formula that would be multi-year instead of year-to-year, and would have as one goal closing the achievement gap between white and minority students.

Commissioners are all for this, as they demonstrated in a unanimous, non-binding resolution Monday. They've clashed with the school board in particular over what commissioners felt were proposals to buy land for school sites that was priced above appraisals, and in some cases without adequate appraisals. It was something the schools should have been watching more closely.

But several important questions have to be asked and answered before any final arrangement is set.

Will commissioners, since they would be more directly involved in planning and land acquisition, site schools in keeping with the school board's priority of maintaining economic balance in individual schools' enrollments? The commissioners would have to resist, for example, pressure from high-end land developers to place schools in places that would be convenient for developments -- and would make houses in such developments more valuable -- if that economic diversity might be tipped out of whack.

There long has been pressure on school board members to abandon those goals of diversity and return to "neighborhood schools," which may be racially and economically skewed. The board has stuck with its policy in the well-founded belief that diverse schools pay academic benefits. Commissioners might be more subject to political pressure on this issue with the new power they would be given under this proposal.

Will school board members have more than perfunctory input into the planning and building of schools? We do not want "bare bones" public schools in this county, which has long been proud of its school system (a system that's also been a key turbine in the economic engine hereabouts). Commissioners understandably want to avoid needless tax increases, but could they resist the pressure to hold down spending for school facilities when setting the tax rate? The idea is merely not to get by; it is to get better.

Finally, commissioners and school board members would have to approach each other in a spirit of good faith and reason. The school board resisted commissioners' objections to some poorly conceived land purchases, when it would have been better to acknowledge that perhaps the commissioners had a point. That stirred animosity. However, some commissioners have long used the schools for political target practice, so it's easy to see why school board members are sensitive to criticism.

This proposal has some promising aspects. But it must be thoroughly examined, pondered, discussed and publicly reviewed in the coming weeks.