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now is the time? There are more questions than answers at this point. A lot of people think you have made up your mind and it's a done deal. It can't be. I'm not here to advocate for or against the merger. I don't know what the right answer is. What I know is I have too many questions to make that decision, and I hope you do too. What I'm here to advocate is that you participate, either directly or indirectly through a new study commission in a deliberative process that examines all of the questions and that you do so in an open and public way so that everybody understands where you are going and why we are going there. David Weinberg: Commissioners good evening. My name is David Weinberg, and I speak tonight on behalf of 50 families from the Chapel Hill-Carrboro district who are opposed to merger. Tonight we'd like to propose a compromise on the merger issue. We ask the Commissioners to work with the school boards to equalize fundings in the two districts, to exact a guarantee of greater collaboration from the two boards, but to stop short of merger. All of us support equalized funding for Orange County, or whatever levels of increased funding the residents of Orange County Schools support. The Orange County system clearly would benefit from language classes at the elementary level, dental care for teachers, improved library collections, and many other items. However, the effort to help one group of students should not come at the expense of another group. Merger would inevitably lead to bussing across the rural buffer. For those children who are bussed into Orange County to fill empty seats, there will likely be bus rides of 45 minutes or longer. This will make it more difficult for parents and students to participate in school activities, and it will very possibly cause some students to become separated from their peers as they move into the middle school or high school levels. There may also be a domino effect with bussing, in which Orange County students are affected, and no one has really talked about whether we're going to try balance SES across the entire County. That would lead to quite a bit of redistricting. Finally, the merger concept will destroy our community-based system, which many of us in our district, and I'm sure many in the Orange County district cherish. This debate is not about discrimination, nor is it about separate but equal. Mr. Carey has introduced phrases into this discussion that resonate with some of the watershed events of American history -such as the Civil Rights Movement. Yet all of us feel deeply that segregation and discrimination are not what we are about. From a local funding perspective, the Chapel Hill district ranked first in the State of North Carolina in 2000-2001 and Orange County ranked fourth out of 117. By comparison, Wake County ranked tenth. The minority populations are almost identical. And on the NC Report Card, the Orange County district, which I'm sure you've all seen, had a very high number of schools of distinction. This is hardly a situation that reflects gross social injustice. What it reflects is that there are two districts in Orange County, both excellent, one who's funding and scores are somewhat higher than the other, and that's all it reflects. We asked BOCC to find a compromise and equalize funding without merger. A compromise which strives to have greater permanence. We ask you not to dissolve two excellent school systems simply because of a failure of imagination. We ask you tonight, do you stand for the Chapel Hill-Carrboro kids as much as you do for the Orange County kids? If you do, we ask you to seek out solutions that are less