It was very much like lining up to cash in a winning lottery ticket and finding out you had only won a few bucks and would have to put those retirement plans on hold for another decade or so.

More than 100 local residents lined up outside Town of Osoyoos council chambers Tuesday morning as rumours were swelling that Boundary-Similkameen MLA Linda Larson was going to be writing a huge cheque to School District 53 – and the cheque would be large enough to allow Osoyoos Secondary School (OSS) to remain open.

Instead, Larson announced the provincial government was handing over a mere $118,102 to the school district.

Talk about a major letdown.

You don’t need a degree in economics to figure out $118,000 isn’t going to change anything, especially with a board of trustees who managed to refuse an offer of more than $1.1 million from the Town of Osoyoos just one month ago in order to try and prevent OSS from closure.

About the only good news from Larson’s announcement is that she fully expects that the same trustees who voted to close OSS must get back to work immediately and find a way to keep the school open.

Larson adamantly and repeatedly commented that she expects these trustees “to do the right thing and keep the school open.”

That was a very clear message from a politician with direct links to Minister of Education Mike Bernier that these trustees – especially the four who voted to close OSS – have failed miserably in their duties to look at all options before voting to close the school.

Board chair Marieze Tarr could not be reached for comment following Larson’s announcement, but there’s no doubt that she and her fellow trustees will have heard the MLA’s message loud and clear.

Many people would rightfully argue that the province got involved in this debacle far too late into the fight and they would be right.

With the doors at OSS scheduled to be closed for good on June 30, there’s not a lot of time to save our school.

But if there’s a will, there’s a way and the seven trustees elected to represent the best interests of the public education system in the Okanagan-Similkameen – and yes that includes the good folks of Oosyoos – have a lot of work to do in the next four weeks.

But it became abundantly clear on Tuesday that the politicians these same trustees must answer to are not happy with the work they’ve done over the past four months.

There is still one month left to save OSS from closure and Larson made it very clear to the trustees that it’s time to quit hiding behind excuses, look at all options they have been presented with over the past five months and come up with a solution to keep this school open now and for years to come.

There’s not a single Osoyoos resident who really believes that several of these trustees had the best interests of this community at heart during the past several weeks, but they’ve been told point blank to give it another try.

And this time they had better try harder to do the right thing.