The Lowell City Council can jump-start a new renaissance for the city, just as it did in the 1980s, with a decision Tuesday night to build a 21st-century high school that will serve students for decades to come.

It’s just not a school that will rise on just any site; it’s a vision of the future and what the city can — and should — become for present and future generations.

This project, done correctly, can solve many of the public school system’s infrastructure needs, incorporating space for a freshman academy and a top-flight special needs facility into a single plan.

The way The Sun sees it, this multipronged approach extends beyond education to the city itself.

Can building a new high school lift everyone’s boat? We think it can.

Unfortunately, this major objective has been ignored from the outset. It has revealed more about political agendas from a small group of people who feel only they can decide what is in the best interest of Lowell rather than promoting an all-inclusive, open conversation that yields insight, initiative and a vision worth building a community consensus for an undertaking of this great magnitude.

The Sun could easily suggest going back to the drawing board and restarting the process under new leadership. Yet that would only serve to delay or kill the chance for Lowell to do something inspiring and extraordinary.

It’s clear the time to move forward is now. The costs, from $330 million to $350 million over four options, are staggering and yet they won’t get any cheaper.

All must embrace the vital work to be done, work that can’t wait, work that we must do together to build a new high school and a revitalized downtown neighborhood district.

The Sun truly believes this project can be Lowell’s greatest ambition and most glorious accomplishment of the 21st century.

There’s only one location that offers both the stunning potential for a new high school and the equally spectacular redevelopment of a major stretch of downtown: Cawley Stadium.

The sprawling Cawley site provides students with a safe, secure and technologically advanced campus with all the amenities of a college environment.

Also, it opens the downtown site of the existing high school to a host of exciting and creative economic development prospects. No doubt the landscape will change. We’re banking on it. For Lowell, there’s a new wave of commercial and residential prosperity on the horizon as well as a truly attractive living and breathing downtown neighborhood with shops, restaurants and other businesses.

The five-story Cawley high school plan is less expensive than the other three downtown options under review. It will also take less time to build — three years as opposed to 4.5 years and up for the other options. While non-reimbursable infrastructure costs will add to the present estimate and place the burden squarely on city taxpayers, Cawley achieves more long-term bang for the buck than the three downtown options — all of which we find untenable.

* Option One, a full renovation of the existing high school buildings, amounts to throwing good money after bad.

* Option Two, an addition and renovation, represents total mediocrity in design and functionality. It reaches its only high point in the amount of disruption it creates for students trying to learn while stuck in the midst of a noisy, and quite possibly, dangerous construction zone for up to 4.5 years.

Option 3, an addition/renovation/eminent domain taking, is an illusion, a more muscular Option 2 fraught with a rabbit hole of legal troubles and cost overruns. The Sun detests this option and the pervasive government infringement it directs against private property owners. Such action would wipe out the Lowell Doctors Park Building from the city’s urban core — and tax rolls — through a hostile eminent domain land-taking. The building has resided at 75 Arcand Drive since 1947, employs 23 Lowellians, and generates nearly 40,000 patient visits annually.

What progressive city in all good conscience could so callously consider voting to scatter six physicians to the wind, mindful that years of legal battles and a huge financial judgment against Lowell are possible?

The Sun understands there’s a strong sentiment among respected members of the community to keep the high school in the heart of the city, where it’s been for virtually its entire existence, beginning in 1831. But aside from nostalgia, there’s no compelling reason to leave it there. The fact that students could attend the current high school while a new one is under construction at Cawley — instead of displacing an entire high school student body and faculty — is almost reason enough to choose an alternate location.

We don’t want to minimize the impact of moving the high school out of the downtown. The main reason to keep it there appears to be its central location, which allows many students from all over the city to walk to school. That won’t be the case if the high school moves to the outskirts of the city.

But as we said, change brings opportunities. One of those — which is long overdue — is a return to neighborhood schools in the lower grades. Let children attend elementary and middle school with their friends. Let them walk to school, and end this needless and wasteful expense of busing young children across the city to attain a racial balance that’s already been achieved.

That money could then be used to provide citywide busing for any high school student who needs it.

All this will take time, but we have at least three years to find solutions for these challenges. One will certainly include ways to control the traffic uptick in Belvidere during certain times of the day, something that busing would certainly help alleviate. (There are seven public schools in the Highlands neighborhood and they get along just fine with residents.)

No matter what councilors decide Tuesday night, Lowell can’t abandon hope for a brighter future — and that future will shine brightest with a new Cawley Stadium high school and a wealth of unique development possibilities for the downtown.