It was clearly one of this legislature’s finest hours as a bi-partisan coalition joined hands with the GOP governor to craft the Grand Bargain to save the City of Detroit.

Unfortunately at this read, there are no signs of a repeat performance as the governor and a handful of others try to save Detroit Public Schools from being dissolved.

Rep. Tim Kelly (R-Saginaw) would vote yes on that as he sees no need to salvage a school district with an alleged shoddy record of wasting money and not educating children at the same time.

The good news for the governor is Mr. Kelly, who controls the purse strings for all K-12 schools, is in the minority on that front.

But the governor does not have a majority on his front to use $715 million of state money to eliminate the DPS deficit.

And his tough assignment of getting a majority got substantially tougher after the House Republicans offered their own plan for fixing the mess in Motown.

The R’s recommended that collective bargaining rights be eliminated for unionized teachers and they called for a new school board to be created over the next eight years.

Nobody else who was interested in resolving the DPS issue would have tossed those two political bombs into the mix, but House Republicans did leave the governor no choice but to reject what they were offering.

The citizens of Detroit, watching all this, want to elect a new school board yesterday, not in eight years, and the Detroit Federation of Teachers is not about to give up any bargaining rights no matter what.

So all this means the DPS reform stuff is dead?

Not even close.

It’s time for all the players to take a deep breath and look at what is really going on here.

2016 is an election year for all house members. Facing the Flint water crisis, house R’s know the D’s are going to use that against the GOP in local elections. The story line will be Republicans had control of all of state government on their watch, and the good citizens of Flint and their kids were poisoned with lead. Vote for Democrats.

To shore up their support back home, the House R’s are scoring points by beating up on Detroit teachers, many of whom have failed to show for work, and by acting tough on efforts to reform the Detroit schools. All this anti-Detroit stuff plays very well with conservative outstate Republican voters.

One theory is all this bravado is for show and merely part of a time honored negotiating strategy to start the talks on the far right so the R’s have something to give away as they move toward the center.

And if you’ve been listening carefully you see signs of that everywhere.

Rep. Al Pscholka (R-West Michigan) chairs the House budget panel. He was one of the sponsors of the House GOP plan that was strongly criticized for its radical tone. He opened the first day of hearings telling the audience, “This is the beginning of a journey.”

If you’ve watched this process you know that is code for, where we are starting today is not where we will end up tomorrow.

Just as saner heads prevailed to save the City of Detroit, there is a good chance, when all the rhetoric dies down, that they will find a way to do the same for Detroit schools.

The fate of 47,000 students is resting on them doing just that.