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seems to be very responsive - a small system. One of my major concerns about the merger is that we'll be dealing with a larger system that won't be as responsive. You know, I see small groups of students or individual schools and the school board responding well to an individual school's or system's needs. And a larger system is probably not going to be able to da that respectively. The second point I think is the funding issue. And when I look at the material provided here tonight by the folks against merger, it disturbs me to see that the Orange County schools, the people in the Orange County school system feel that they are not adequately funded; their needs are not adequately being met. But, that being said, I think that given the options we've seen given tonight, there's a lot of smack people in this room, we should be able to find a way to meet the needs of the Orange County system without necessarily going through the whole process of merger, which itself may be inefficient, which may introduce other expenses. We have other options. We have a countywide tax, we have an OCS tax, and other special district taxes, and we have some combination of those methods that may be able to address this problem. Finally, something a little bit closer to my heart is the problem we may run into as a countywide Schaal system if we are forced to have equal funding of all pupils. Now, in Chapel Hill, I've lived there now 13 years, and I've been happily paying a higher rate of taxes than the folks in Orange County for the education that our children get. And I don't mind paying that. And I've known for some years that we have a lot more ESL, English as Second Language students, we have more special needs students than the rest of the County. If we put ourselves in the position of having to force equal funding far all of the students, we may, in Chapel Hill for example, run into the problem of not having enough funding for these particular groups of students, and if the one school system decides that they want to fund more for this, well my view is that they should be allowed to do that. And if we are forced into equal funding for everybody, we may not have that flexibility. Thank you again for your time tonight and the opportunity to speak. Elizabeth Brown: Thank you. I'll say it again. It's a good thing we didn't ask the voters about integration, or every person in here would look the same. Why don't we just move to Chapel Hill? Poverty is a messy thing. So are families in trouble. And poor children from troubled homes can be the most difficult of all -the neediest, the most painful to look at, because we knave how awful their situation is and how good it could be. These kids usually need more resources than those from healthier families. One third of the students in Orange County schools come from families' poor enough to qualify for federal free ar reduced lunch. Imagine splitting the room here into one third, having that many disadvantaged students. Our neighbors in Chapel Hill have only 13% of children in that program. Last year I read regularly with first graders at Grady Brown Elementary. One little boy obviously came from a poor home. He was a goad reader, and he wouldn't let me go when his turn was over. "Can you read with your mom or dad tonight?" I asked. He shook his head. "Daddy was being mean to us, so they took him away." Of course I mentioned this to the teacher and she confirmed that the father had been removed from the home for beating the mother and the children. Every time I walked into that classroom, he'd run over to me. He wanted attention. He had trouble with his temper. Where could he get the help that he needed? The teacher was busy teaching; a social worker comes only once a week because she serves three schools in