Buckle up.

This could be a bumpy ride.

Back in 1994, when lawmakers eliminated the property tax for funding schools, they were desperate to find a new tax to pay for your kids’ education.

Rather than vote on one by themselves — and, remember, lawmakers are loath to raise taxes — they hatched an ingenious scheme to let you do it.

Thus, Proposal A was hatched, and lawmakers gave you a choice: Hike the income tax or hike the sales tax, and the majority picked the latter. Either way, there was going to be a tax hike, and the beauty — as noted — is that you did it, and took legislators off the tax-hike hook.

Now comes the state public education lobby, which has greatly benefited from all those federal COVID-19 dollars, with a historic K-12 per-pupil budget of over 9,000 smackers for every kid in a seat.

But those folks know that, starting next year, the COVID-19 windfall will evaporate — and then what?

Always worried that there will never be enough revenue to “fully fund” the schools, the education leaders have begun private talks with key legislators about a Prop A approach to finding another reliable money source, pronto, before the next downturn in the economy hits them in their three R’s.

Peter Spadafore, a veteran executive of education funding wars, discloses Plans A, B, and C to get there.

Under the first one, lawmakers would vote to expand the state sales tax to tax services. If adopted, those who play golf, go to the movies, send their duds to the dry cleaners, and utilize other optional services would pay the 6% sales tax, with a big chunk earmarked for schools.

Now, nobody in the current Legislature was around for the battle in 1994, but most of them can read, or, somewhere along the line, they have learned what happened then: Those lawmakers punted the issue to the voters.

Which is why there is a Plan B, which does just that. Lawmakers would put the proposal on the ballot and give you two tax choices, supposedly the sales tax on services and maybe the income tax, a la Prop A. Note that voting to place that on the ballot is a decidedly easier vote than actually implementing the tax by themselves.

If that Plan B goes up in flames, the education lobby could launch a statewide petition drive to get enough signatures to put both tax choices in front of you.

They don’t like Plan C, for obvious reasons. It’s costly, time-consuming, an intense volunteer effort is needed to get the names, and then even more money is needed to sell it to the electorate.

None of that is going to happen right now, as the talks are preliminary and nobody has chatted to the person occupying the governor’s chair. And a signoff from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is a key ingredient to the final outcome.

But, at this read, Spadafore sees a “better than 50-50 chance” it will happen in the next two years, as history may or may not repeat itself, with the fate of every school kid hanging in the balance.

Put this column under glass until then.