When the Patterson Joint Unified School District campaigned last fall to get a bond measure passed, its sales pitch was clear: Vote for Measure V, hike up your own property taxes, and we’ll get to work on projects like modernizing Patterson High School’s agricultural science and auto mechanics building.

That building, actually, was the most highly touted project on the list of things the bond would pay for. Finishing off the new Walnut Grove School was another big one. Paying off as much as $12 million in debt was part of the plan, but it was never something school officials wanted to talk much about.

Now that the bond has passed, it’s become clear that a number of economic factors are going to prevent the district from following through with everything it claimed it would get done.

Can you guess what’s moving to the top of the list? Paying off that debt.

Can you guess what’s getting pushed back? Modernizing that ag and auto building.

This looks like a clear bait-and-switch by the school district, but we’ll give the trustees the benefit of the doubt when they say paying off the debt first will help them more in the short term — if it can save even one teacher from being laid off, we’ll feel an awful lot better about it.

Still, if voters in November had known that the first thing the district was going to do with the bond money was pay down its own debt, would they really have voted for it? Does anyone feel good about paying down the school district’s debt instead of their own?

The ag and auto shop issue is also troubling. The district said in a press release this week that the $2.8 million to upgrade the building will be paid for entirely by the state if the district is approved for financial hardship status — passing the bond was a necessary step toward receiving that designation and the funding that comes with it.

If the hardship status is not granted, the state could still chip in $1.6 million, and the rest could be paid for by the bond sales. But that state money is frozen, and the way the state’s finances are going, there can be no guarantees that it will ever be unfrozen or that it won’t be used for something else entirely.

If that happens, it could jeopardize the ag and auto building modernization altogether.

We understand that the economy has changed since Nov. 4 and that priorities must shift when times are tough. It’s something we face in our own families every day.

But we don’t do it with taxpayer money.

The district has followed through on its promise not to raise school bond taxes beyond their 2001 levels — and we believe trustees will stick to that one — but doing so could force the district to go back on another promise of getting the ag and auto building modernized.

The district might be justified in its course of action with this bond money, especially given the current economic climate, but the public’s trust in its school officials will likely suffer because of it.