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The importance of raising our children to be international citizens of the earth. The importance of smaller high schools in order to reach mare students and increase the graduation rate. I could go on, but we have all heard and read the same headlines. We feel that the schools in this area are doing a tremendous job meeting these education challenges. That is why we are concerned that the County Manager has recommended a budget that is $2 million short of Dr. Pedersen's requested budget. Although we appreciate that there are competing interests far County funds, educating our nation's young people has never been mare critical and must be viewed as a top priority. Yet, it seems that we continue to have to fight for the funding that is required to do this. Orange County is known nationally (perhaps even internationally) for its high quality of education. High quality schools are often a main reason cited for bringing families to this area. Indeed, the student enrollment far CHCCS is projected to grow by 3 percent next year. We should be doing everything we canto promote the vision and initiatives of the school system. We feel that the CHCCS school board's request for an 11 % increase in funding is reasonable. Costs associated with the Governor's and State Senate's proposed salary increases of 8%, the opening of Carrboro High School, and the new high school schedule will use much of that 11 °~ increase. Therefore, a two million dollar gap in funding will not provide sufficient funds to continue the current level of services. This is unacceptable to us. This amount of a shortfall will farce the school board to include cuts that will negatively impact instructional personnel and services. We need our schools to remain strong for our children and for our community. We respectfully request that you fully fund the budget as presented by the CHCCS School Board." Ray E. Martin, President of CHCCS Association of Educators, said that they represent about 300 of the educators in the best school system in the country and the state. He said that they are so good because education is so important. He said that the citizens would rather elect the County Commissioners to raise their taxes than to sit back and let the schools fail. He said that the CHCCS Association of Educators request that the County Commissioners fully fund both the operational and capital budget. He said that the school system requested an increase in the district tax but it was not approved in the County Manager's recommended budget. They don't know why that happened.. He made reference to the lottery and said that some of this money may or may not be available. It would be nice to reduce taxes in the future with the lottery, but there are too many questions and the number of people playing the lottery has gone down. He said that it would be better to get what you know you will get, rather than guessing at it. Gwen Kansler has been a registered nurse at UNC for 25 years. She said that 3 years ago she received a call from the Orange County Health Department to join the newly formed Public Health Reserve Corps. The Corps wanted to draw on the expertise of health professionals living in Orange County and to provide leadership, training, and coordination of public health services to assist the health department staff. She said that she jumped at the chance to do this and since 2003, the Health Department has recruited and trained 193 volunteers for Orange County during natural disasters, disease outbreaks, orbio-terrorism instances. The Corps consists of 130 nurses and other health professionals and they have been trained in staffing emergency shelters, mass medication dispensing, disaster preparedness, and bio-terrorism response. They have demonstrated their training in several events, and she listed them. She said that the federal grant that funded the initiation in early years of the corps is due to expire this fall. She asked the County Commissioners to consider funding the Public Health Reserve Corps.