Four candidates running as a popular front for the Butler School Board intend to toss a monkey wrench into the workings of the district’s school consolidation model, Plan 4B.

The plan was first approved in January in a 6-3 board vote and is touted to save $1.5 million per year.

A social construct that is fair and equitable, 4B is a moderate, middle-of-the-road option that doesn’t please everybody. School consolidation is always problematic.

But come December, the four pretenders to the board say they will make good on their threat to reverse and scrap 4B and substitute an impetuous consolidation scheme to satisfy a small group of angst-ridden helicopter parents.

Indeed, this scheme, I think, is seriously flawed by an unstable foundation of fear, prejudice and paranoia.

They claim this reckless action is all justified by a vox populi or will of the people mandate they received in the primary. That’s pure bunk. The turnout for the school board primary was only 19 percent, according to the county election bureau. Countywide, the primary turnout was 26 percent.

More importantly, these folks ran without competition, unopposed. It’s like running a solitary horse in the Kentucky Derby. Eventually he gallops across the finish line and is declared the winner. But isn’t that a hollow victory?

That brings me to my conclusion that the 2015 school board primary election was a beauty pageant and hardly a decisive mandate to reverse implementation of the consolidation of Butler schools.