CLEVELAND — The Cleveland and Woodleaf elementary schools aren’t expected to merge until late 2017 at the earliest, but members of the Cleveland Board of Commissioners are already thinking ahead.

Recently, they sent a letter to Dr. Carol Spalding, president of Rowan-Cabarrus Community College, asking if the college would like use of the building when it becomes available.

For the board, it’s making the best of the situation.

“We tried to talk ‘em out of putting the two schools together,” Cleveland Commissioner Gerald Osborne said.

But the school board voted to consolidate the two schools, and Osborne and the other town commissioners believe that the current elementary school would make a good extension for RCCC.

“We’ve got a school system facility over here that could be used for higher education,” Osborne said.

The letter details an 8-acre campus and a facility with a good library, buildings for technical teaching and close proximity to police, fire, EMS and Daimler’s Freightliner truck manufacturing plant.

“Technical skills can be improved, and will support existing industries, health vocations and business organizations. This can lead to future skilled job opportunities,” the proposal reads.

The letter also says the building is in good condition, but a recent long-range facilities plan presented to the Board of Education cited Cleveland and Woodleaf schools, both nearly a century old, as being the least energy efficient and in the worst repair of the county’s elementary schools.

The Cleveland Elementary property is owned by the Rowan-Salisbury Board of Education, not the town of Cleveland. Board of Education Chairman Josh Wagner received a copy of the letter and said that the town thinking ahead is a positive thing.

“Any idea we can come up with and any solution we can come up with is a good thing,” he said.

Currently, the Board of Education is trying to dispose of its offices on South Long Street. When Woodleaf and Cleveland are consolidated into a western elementary school, the board will have to figure out what to do with two buildings. Wagner says that figuring out what to do with vacated buildings is something of a recurring problem. And while he thinks the proposal is a step in the right direction, it’s still too early to make any decisions.

“There’s a lot of things that would have to come together for this to even be a discussion,” Wagner said.

Spalding said that the letter was “impressive,” and showed that Cleveland viewed RCCC as an economic development engine. Currently, Spalding said, RCCC has 65 students who live in Cleveland.

“We don’t feel like that’s enough,” she said.

Spalding said the college doesn’t have the funds at the moment to acquire a building, and has other construction projects that are more pressing. But RCCC will be talking about immediate assistance it can provide to Cleveland in the form of online programs or other services and and will be discussing longer term partnerships with Cleveland and other municipalities.

“When these kinds of ideas come up, I think people think that they get done in a hurry, and they don’t,” Spalding said.

Osborne says he knows nothing will be done immediately, but he wants to get people thinking about the property’s future.

“It’s too good of a location to let it go to waste,” he said.