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funding may well be, and maybe then we could probably discuss merger as somebody else has suggested. Adrian Halpern: I have been a Chapel Hill resident for 25 years. As one who lived through the enforced bussing of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system, I can testify that the social engineering behind that project had greatly disruptive results, turning an educational system that had pockets of excellence into one that became uniformly mediocre. I fear the same thing will happen to the Chapel Hill school system, which has been acclaimed as one of the best in our country. What make schools and school systems great are, first of all, concerned parents -parents who encourage their children to learn and to assist and support teachers in their work. The primary reason why the Chapel Hill schools are so excellent is because Chapel Hill is an academic community where a high percentage of parents have been willing to devote huge amounts of their time encouraging their children's educational endeavors and where the rest of the community has supported this. As a clear indicator of their concern, Chapel Hill residents have long been willing to shoulder the burden of much higher taxes than those in Orange County to help ensure that their children have a superior school infrastructure and an environment that welcomes innovative, effective teachers and provides teachers with superior tools to carry out their missions. A merger of Chapel Hill and Orange County's school systems would be fundamentally unfair to the Chapel Hill community, which has long shouldered the burden of much higher taxes. By requiring Chapel Hill to dilute its school system's resources by merging it with a system that has historically not been as preoccupied with its educational mission, would be an injustice to Chapel Hill residents. It has been suggested that in the event of merger, Orange County taxes will go up in the future to equal those of Chapel Hill, but that is insufficient. In the event of merger, the fair and equitable thing would be to also levy a special school tax assessment on Orange County residents to help make up for the deficient resources devoted to their schools over the past couple of decades. A reasonable proposal for a special school tax assessment is to calculate the disparity in school related taxes between Orange County and Chapel Hill over say the past 20-25 years, and in addition to future increases in Orange County taxes, levy aone-time special tax assessment on Orange County residents to make up for the historical shortfall in their education funding. In the event of merger, to not make such aone-time special tax assessment on Orange County residents will allow them to get a free ride an the backs of Chapel Hill taxpayers. In conclusion, I say no to this quick fix merger idea, and yes to Orange County residents learning from the Chapel Hill example of what must be done over time to improve their children's education. Nicole Lyght: My name is Nicole Lyght and this is my mother Colleen Rogers. I am a sophomore at Chapel Hill High School. From, I think it was in second grade, I was in Chapel Hill-Carrboro City school system, and then I moved down to Hillsborough and I was there until about ninth grade, and then I came back to the Chapel Hill school district. The differences I noticed between the two school districts are basically the grading. Many students from Chapel Hill High have complained about their grades being bad because they feel that the curriculum or the things that they're supposed to study are based upon college-like material and not high school material. And in Orange High, no student ever complained about that. Yau know, you get the regular complaints about their grades being bad, but not the complaints about it being off topic or whatever. And I feel that if we do the merger or whatever, that the school systems will have the same grading, the same curriculum, the same studies, and they'll be able to prepare