The goal may have been ambitious, but it should have been in the realm of the possible, given how much support the “cool schools initiative” had.

Putting air conditioners and other heat-abatement improvements into the 1,000 hottest classroom by year’s end was a mission pushed by Gov. David Ige. And this year lawmakers were persuaded that students sweltering at their desks deserved conditions conducive to learning, and funded it to the tune of $100 million.

But progress has lagged dismally, by anyone’s measure. The numbers presented to the state Board of Education tell the story: Only 42 classrooms have air conditioner units installed, with just six weeks left in the year. And some of that total included donated units, according to figures presented to the board.

This is quite dispiriting for a project given such emphasis by the executive and legislative branches alike. The Department of Education provides assurances that the logjam of contracting and delivery of the improvements to classrooms will clear and that progress will accelerate.

While the public waits to see if that prediction is borne out, let’s review a few of the missteps — and consider ways to ensure that future large-scale facility upgrades might go better.

DOE officials did try to streamline the procurement process by prequalifying contractor bidders in advance, but there was a disappointingly small turnout. It’s plain that they needed to cast a wider net and earlier than they did.

One problem they discovered and corrected was that the complexity of the jobs deterred some potential bidders. Perhaps the complication stemmed from the original intended use of a fund aimed not at simple facility upgrades but at achieving greater energy efficiency.

The classroom upgrades were conceived initially by the Ige administration as work that could be financed through the state’s Green Energy Market Securitization (GEMS) fund, including energy-efficient lighting and other fixes, in addition to conventional air conditioning.

Lawmakers felt uncomfortable with using the fund for that purpose, though. GEMS was meant to incentivize market-driven public-private partnerships, not renovations to the state infrastructure. Senate Bill 3126 passed with a $100 million general fund appropriation which, legislators reasoned, would give the DOE greater flexibility to combine multiple jobs and get the work done at one time.

But given the age of most public school facilities, the upgrades are complicated, shrinking the list of willing companies and extending the window of time it would take. On balance, a bundling-of-jobs list was not the best route, and time was lost.

Exploring more ways of compressing the procurement schedule for major projects is something the DOE should do and present to lawmakers at the start of the next session, when this effort should get a full public review. It may not be an emergency on the order of the homelessness crisis, in which broader exemptions were allowed, but surely the process can be flattened to some extent.

Going forward, the DOE should continue to work with the community on innovations that could spell relief in hot classrooms, approaches that don’t always emerge with improvement campaigns of this magnitude. Small ideas should be welcomed as part of the mix, while the district-wide improvement is being completed, and afterward.

And that should happen at a faster pace.

As for the taxpaying public and the families of public school kids, they can hope that some hard lessons have been learned — and that better ways will be found to improve an essential element of the state’s services. School children shouldn’t have had to wait so long for something this basic.