What is most disheartening about the current standoff over high school funding is what it says about the potential for the Island to provide its children with the kind of learning environment they need and deserve.

One of the best examples of successful intra-Island collaboration, the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, has now become a pawn in the unproductive, if familiar political sport of sniping among towns.

This particular skirmish was set off by Oak Bluffs voters’ refusal, at last spring’s annual town meeting, to contribute $350,000 toward a feasibility study to determine whether the Island needs to build a new high school or renovate the current one. Oak Bluffs has long felt burdened by hosting the high school, the hospital, the YMCA, the ice rink and Martha’s Vineyard Community Services — all non-tax-paying entities — and seized a moment to register its protest.

If there’s any merit to the town’s gripe, it has seriously overplayed its hand by proposing a radical change in the funding formula for the high school, now based on the number of students from each town who go there.

The Oak Bluffs proposal, to shift to a formula based on property values, would dramatically raise costs for Chilmark, Edgartown and Aquinnah. Predictably, those towns have balked, with Edgartown leaders stalking out of a meeting where the issue was under discussion.

Now comments are bubbling up around the Island that perhaps the high school doesn’t really need a major renovation or rebuild. Maybe a little maintenance, some nips and tucks, a small facelift, is all the facility, sixty years old this year and last renovated in the 1990s, really needs.

If there is any lesson from the Tisbury School debacle, it is that getting voters to support capital spending for school buildings is an uphill battle, even when proponents have carefully laid the groundwork and mounted a strong campaign.

Where are the high school’s supporters? If anything is to happen, those who believe that their own children and their neighbors’ children need not only an excellent education and good playing fields, but a modern, functional building, must start making their case.

That means appealing to school and town leadership to suspend their bickering over funding formulas and begin to focus on what it is they are fighting for.