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Valerie Summers: Good evening. As a relatively newcomer to Chapel Hill-Carrboro, this being the largest community I have ever lived in in my life. I grew up in farm type areas in a horrendously bad school system. I used to live in Robeson County, which I know is not one of the top school systems in the State. So I'm going to try and bring to you a little different perspective. It has been stated that expenditure per student does not equate with student performance. I will tell you what four statistical things do. Family situation - do you have two people in the home taking care of the children? Number one. Number two -maternal educational level. Number three -paternal educational level. Do the mom and dad have more than a high school diploma? Do they have a high school diploma? Do they have grad school education? Next thing is the age of the parents at birth, when a child is born (i.e., older parents seem to do a better job). So, is the solution merging systems when none of these things will be affected by merger? I don't think so, because it's going to, I believe, affect times on buses as everybody stated, which isn't going to be a good thing. I don't think we've seen good effects from this in Wake County. As a matter of fact, in Delaware, which have a little bit of personal experience with, even though I grew up in Pennsylvania, has totally gotten rid of the idea of bussing children from one end of the state to the other because it's non-productive. Instead, what we should do is single out the children who are having trouble -whether this can be based on EOG scores, based on socioeconomics, based on family educational level -and instead give these children some individual learning in an after school environment. Yes this is going to cost some money, but maybe we can at least see where the money's going rather than just pouring water into a sieve with ideas that have no foundation and just watch the water flow away. I don't think the people in Orange County want to have their taxes raised without somebody having some reasonable plan as to where this money is going to go. I'm going to state to you EOG statistics. My children go to Estes, 94t" percentile math, 95t" percentile reading. Hillsborough Elementary - 96t" percentile math, 97t" percentile reading. Two percent higher. Grady Brown - 90t" percentile math, 92nd percentile reading. Two to three percent worse. Is that of statistical significance, I don't know, find a statistician. Ok? State averages, by the way are 88 percent math and 85 percent reading. Both school districts are obviously doing better. Should three people make the decision that's going to affect 17,000 children and at least 50,000 people? Matthew Barton: Good evening Commissioners and Manager Link. Thank you for inviting us to speak tonight. I'm speaking as the legislative liaison for the McDougle Elementary School PTA. My name is Matthew Barton and I live in Carrboro. I have two children in the public school system. I won't read this entire statement. Much of it has been said much better by other speakers already tonight. I will just say that on September 17t", the McDougle Elementary PTA Board discussed the merger issue and adopted principles that if felt should guide the PTA Council as they try to move towards a position on the merger. Firstly, we felt that no merger should be effective as soon as 2004, that would really be too rushed. Secondly, we felt that merger should not be undertaken unless it was the only way to improve the quality of education for the student of both school systems. There are a number of some bullets there. We felt that Commissioners could and should address the funding equity issue through their annual budget process. We felt that the Commissioners should appoint a task force to