After literally years of back-and-forth over the issue, the Suffolk School Board has finally purchased the property upon which it will build a new elementary school to serve students in the southern part of the city.

A year after closing Robertson Elementary School in Whaleyville, causing all of that facility’s students to be relocated to other schools in Suffolk, the process that will culminate in a new school serving both Whaleyville and Holland is finally about to take some tangible steps.

The city’s decision to locate the school along Route 58 leaves a lot of room for doubt, as it seems to ignore the realities of traffic and development pressures in that area. Still, there are times when even the wrong — or at least less-right — decision is preferable to none at all.

In the case of this new school facility, school administrators, School Board members, the City Council and just about everyone else involved dragged their feet, turned their backs on one another and generally refused to compromise or cooperate for far too long. Hence, the final choice of location for the school was one that made nobody very happy — except, perhaps, for the previous owner of the new school site.

But Suffolk is desperately in need of this new facility. With Robertson closed and Southwestern Elementary in advanced stages of decline, the city was headed quickly toward a point at which residents of Whaleyville and Holland would be left without an elementary school at all. This purchase ensures there will be a school to serve their children.

In the end, that’s about the best that can be wrung from this long, sordid tale.