The image is a strange one — dozens of mobile units, or trailers, spread across the Rowan-Salisbury School System at the same time it says its buildings are thousands of seats under capacity.

School Board Chairman Josh Wagner recently used capacity numbers, specifically that there are enough empty elementary school seats for 5.5 average-sized Rowan-Salisbury elementary schools, as a central part of his argument for closure.

But there are trailers at a majority of the district’s elementary schools and two schools that are closed — Cleveland and Woodleaf. And in recent weeks, the school board has discussed whether those trailers are needed.

An argument for removing trailers entirely is that classes could be moved back into school buildings if capacity is the problem. Class sizes might grow, but that’s better than closing community schools.

It’s not that simple, said Superintendent Lynn Moody on Monday. There are restorative programs or labs in the trailers for which older schools were not designed.

School board member Travis Allen said he did not want to see classes forced to share space or have classes housed on carts that wheel in and out of that shared space.

Vice Chair Susan Cox said doing away with trailers at Faith Elementary would leave some programs without space to operate — a peculiar argument considering she seemed to support closing the same school on the basis that there were too many empty seats. And, at Faith Elementary School, two trailers are used for first-grade classrooms, according to data presented Monday.

It all seems contradictory to the debate the school board was having just a couple weeks ago.

If Bostian Elementary is the only place where trailers are required to teach students assigned there, we think board member Dean Hunter makes the most persuasive argument — removing them when possible.

Even if the trailers are must-haves, they don’t look good, Hunter said. And if the school system isn’t addressing capital needs or spending money to fix trailers, both end up in a state of disrepair, he said. Hunter’s preference is to move all instruction back into school buildings.

Many of the so-called mobile units are empty. That seems like a good place to start. And if there are not buyers readily available for the units, perhaps the best solution is to scrap them.

Whatever the solution, the school system cannot credibly make a case that mobile units or trailers need to stay at schools where they’re used while simultaneously arguing for closure of the same schools.