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seriously jump ahead. And I really appreciate you staying tonight and I appreciate all the people in the audience staying tonight. Thank you very much for your time. Atul Peres da Silva: Good evening, my name is Atul Peres da Silva, and I'm a dad from Chapel Hill. Two points I have and I'll try to keep them brief. The first point - I was born and brought up in probably one of the poorest countries in the world. My mom and dad struggled to put food on the table. But the one thing that my mom and dad always insisted was to have a good education. And to me, having money is not the answer. It's family, it's community, it's friends, and it's hard work. That's what counts. You can have all the money in the world and you can have the worst students. Money is not going to buy you education. To me the biggest crime that we have committed is we have not addressed the question of equity in funding. We are trying to answer one question with another issue. Please salve the question of equity in funding, but don't make merger the issue. That's not the issue. The issue is if you are interested inequity in funding, resolve it by all means. There is a lot of uncertainty out there, and by trying to answer one question by raising another problem, you're fooling yourselves. You are five very intelligent people. I think you can make the choice and figure out what's important. Point number two - I live in the northern corridor, and I can pretty much assume that all five of you don't have children that are age five or six. If you do, I'm amazed. Hopefully you don't. So I'm going to start by asking all five of you to close your eyes and to pretend it's 2005, middle of August, and all five of you are still in office, and eve of you have made the decision last year in 2004 to go through with the merger. Tomorrow morning is the start of the new school year, and each of you has asix-year- old child. Close your eyes and think of going to your child and saying, "Honey, tomorrow you've gotta get up and go to school and we're so excited because you're six years old and you've just finished kindergarten and you're going to first grade." And they look at you and you say, "But you know what? You've got to get up 45 minutes earlier." And they look at you and they say, "But why mommy, why daddy, why do we have to get up so much earlier?" "Well, because I made the decision, you're going to have to drive longer." And they look at you with tears in their eyes and they say, "But why mommy, why daddy? Why did you make us have to drive so much further?" I want you to think of that when you make your decision. Don't think of your political career, don't think of where you are today, and don't think of where you are tomorrow. But think of the future and think of the children, because they are the future and they will decide where we go in the future. Jim Henniger: My name is Jim Henniger. Can we just promise we're not going to bus? No bussing. Now we've got a whole another conversation going. My grandfather came to Chapel Hill in the 1920's and bought the dry goods stare on Franklin Street. It became the Andrews Henniger store. My father grew up in the Chapel Hill school system, graduated from Chapel Hill High when it was aver where the dental school is. So I've been through three mergers now, this is my third. I'm getting to be kind of an expert. My first one was in the 60's; it was a court ordered merger. I was living in Durham. My oldest son went through the merger there. There are a lot of commonalities going on and one of those is emotion. We've all seen that. Another one