The time is way past due for an upgrade to the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, a major capital spending project that is projected to cost at least $100 million.

And it’s unconscionable and frankly embarrassing that an Island with so much wealth, privilege and intellectual capital cannot get its act together to take care of one of its most valuable assets.

But there it is for all the world to see at 100 Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road: an ailing brick building, its roof leaking, HVAC systems failed, track and fields worn and suffering from years of neglect masquerading as deferred maintenance.

This is the building that houses the Performing Arts Center, one of the few large venues on the Island and a community space desperately needed for concerts, Islandwide meetings and special events, not to mention high school assemblies.

This is where we educate our most precious commodity — Island youth — during a critical developmental stage in their young lives before entering college, the work force, adulthood. The excellent educational programs and stellar student achievements in academics and sports at the high school over the years only serve to underscore the failure when it comes to taking care of the building in a fiscally responsible manner.

The last upgrade at the high school was in 1995.

The high school has been shut out six times by the Massachusetts School Building Authority, the state agency that provides significant reimbursement for major school capital projects, all because school leaders have been unable to muster the required support from Island towns to get a feasibility study off the ground for a new high school.

A perennial roadblock is the high school funding formula that dictates how the six towns pay for the school budget and capital projects. Oak Bluffs, which hosts the high school, argues that the enrollment-based formula fails to take into account the burden that town incurs to support the school and other community assets that don’t contribute to its tax rolls.

At least two of the other five towns stand just as strongly on the other side of the fence. The debate dates back for more than a decade, with the most recent standoff going on since 2018.

It will take some negotiation to solve the impasse, but someone needs to knock heads and rally support for what surely must be the regional school district’s most urgent priority. And so far that leadership hasn’t come from the superintendent’s office.

Instead of planning for a new high school in a methodical, forward-thinking way, superintendent Dr. Matthew D’Andrea and the regional school committee allowed themselves to become immersed in planning for a privately funded multi-million-dollar athletic field project. Taxpayer money paid for the feasibility work for this project that was strangely put ahead of developing a master plan for the high school campus. Today, that project remains deeply mired in bitter politics.

This week, the Oak Bluffs selectmen balked at signing on to an Islandwide letter to the MSBA that had the modest goal of showing unity among the six towns for building a new school. It was a high-profile nose-thumbing that the superintendent shouldn’t have let happen — and it wasn’t lost on the MSBA.

Our regional high school deserves to be a source of pride for the community, not another example of petty parochialism. Parents with children in the schools, people who use the Performing Arts Center, anyone who cares about education should be demanding a decent facility and the leadership to make it happen.