Can you imagine schools without football fields? Prince William School Board Chairman Babur Lateef can.

MANASSAS — Football fields are a common amenity at Prince William County middle and high schools.

But in a time when the county’s population continues to grow, and when there are fewer and fewer acres on which to build the new schools that are needed to keep up, what if they weren’t?

“Do we need to have a football field at every middle school? Who does it benefit? Kids in regular gym classes can’t even use the field [during the school day] because they’ll mess up the turf,” said Prince William County School Board Chairman, At-large Babur Lateef.

The thought of doing away with football fields at schools may be an unpopular idea, and Lateef knows it.

“If I come out as Chairman, and say I want to get rid of middle school sports, I’m going to have a riot at the school board meeting,” Lateef told a group of professionals inside the offices of the Prince William Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday.

The idea isn’t to do away with scholastic sports, but, rather consolidate extra-curricular sports activities into a single spot, like a field house. Such a building could be used by multiple sports teams from multiple schools. Multiple field houses could be constructed to serve students on both the eastern and western ends of the county.

This would free up Prince William  school officials from a long-standing requirement to build schools on acres and acres of land — a requirement that’s in place mostly for open field space, not classrooms. Current code requires 80 acres for high schools, 60 for middle schools, and 20 for elementary schools.

As the eastern side of the county is already “built out,” and the western side of the county grows, open space is becoming rarer. Couple that with proffer law changes from 2016 that now has the county government on the hook for purchasing new land for school sites rather than having developers donate parcels of land for schools as part of large, multi-home housing developments, it’s got officials like Lateef thinking outside box.

But it’s not just Lateef. Oddly enough, the Democrat is in agreement with his one-time rival Republican Corey Stewart, whom he unsuccessfully ran against for Board of Supervisors Chairman, At-large in 2011.

Stewart, during his final State of County Address on Tuesday, challenged his fellow Board of Supervisors members to put forward to voters this November a new bond referendum that would fund the construction of new roads and transportation improvements, and places to play. After 15 years on the Board, Stewart said would not seek another term as Chairman this year, and that, for the time being, he was getting out of politics.

“Although we have built many new fields, none of them are indoors, and for much of the year, cold and inclement weather prohibit their use. The community has called for the construction of indoor recreation facilities that allow for indoor track, basketball, volleyball, soccer, lacrosse, racquetball, and maybe even pickleball. We must consider constructing indoor sports facilities—on both sides of our County–that allow our residents of all ages to live a healthy lifestyle and meet a broad range of community needs 12 months a year and in all weather conditions,” said Stewart.

It is almost as if Lateef and Stewart had a discussion about the concept in recent days. They didn’t, said Lateef.

That bond, some officials have told Potomac Local, could be as much as a $1 billion. Lateef is hopeful the school division could get about 10 percent of it for capital projects like the field houses, but also to fund the revitalization of the county’s oldest high schools — Brentsville, Osbourn Park, Stonewall Jackson, Gar-Field, and Woodbridge high schools.

Improvements to these schools, as outlined in a recent report, would make them more secure and more IT-friendly, and would bring the facilities up to par with others in the county like Battlefield, Colgan and Patriot high schools.