Predicting the future is dicey. Even the works of Nostradamus are vague and open to interpretation.

Still, it doesn't take a seer like Nostradamus to look ahead in Harford County and realize the local public school system needs to overhaul its approach to building and maintaining schools, as a recent two-part series in the pp&t section of this newspaper made clear.

The recent addition of Red Pump Elementary School to the county system substantially increased the elementary level capacity, which already was beyond what was needed given the local school-age population.

The BRAC expansion at Aberdeen Proving Ground was on the horizon when planning for a new elementary school, the one that turned out to be Red Pump, was going on, so it was perfectly reasonable to expect something of an increase in enrollment. While the full effect of the BRAC expansion may not yet have hit, it appears additions coming to the school system because of increases in population are being offset by other demographic forces. Similarly, the construction of the Patterson Mill Middle and High School may have seemed like a good idea at the time because of an expected BRAC population bump, even if it hasn't been what was expected.

The population of the county, like the population of the state, appears to be relatively static, especially compared to the growing Sun Belt states or the states like Pennsylvania that have experienced marked population declines. A stable population in terms of numbers can be expected to get older, on average, and the older people are, the less likely they are to have school-age kids.

Whereas Harford County had been a rapidly growing county for the years well into the 1990s, it appears these days it is more of a mature metropolitan county as opposed to the rural place it was in the 1950s and 1960s. Being a metro county doesn't mean growth is over, so there won't be a need for new schools. What it does mean, however, is the county needs to find a better way to deal with localized school crowding issues.

While this seems like a simple observation, the reality is the school system has had tremendous difficulty when it comes to using its extra capacity. In recent years, the parts of the county that grew first, namely the Route 40 corridor, have been where excess school capacity has been. Crowding has been a problem in the Route 24 corridor, which saw substantial population growth from the early 1980s on.

Shifting students from the western Route 24 neighborhoods to eastern Route 40 schools has been a hard sell, not only because of distance, but also because of demographics. The west side is more affluent and the east side is afflicted by social ills that are problems in less affluent communities. There's also the matter of race, which appears to play a role in the divide.

The reality of the situation is, while sending students to schools as close to their homes as possible should always be the goal, building new schools to deal, for example, with crowding in Fallston even as there is extra space in Joppa and Edgewood, is a poor use of public resources. In the northern end of the county, North Harford High and Middle Schools take in students from a geographic area that requires bus rides at least the distance from Aberdeen to Bel Air.

The key in making the best use of schools that may not be geographically ideal will be making each school as attractive to the families of school age kids as the next school. This means focusing more intently on schools where there are deficiencies (something that has been done to some extent in recent years) and doing a better job with maintenance and upkeep, especially in the older schools.

To the degree that these issues already have been addressed — and a fair number of them have been — it becomes incumbent on the school system to make sure the word gets out about the quality of all schools, and then to make the hard decisions about reassigning those who will fill the excess capacity.