The Fayette County Board of

Education, Superintendent Dr. DeCotis, and the Facilities Action Committee,

which is made up of members of the community and system level staff, continue

to grapple with the difficult decision of what to do about extreme overcrowding

in our schools.

This is no little problem, and there are no easy solutions. Band-Aid solutions,

such as redistricting primarily, and split sessions as a last painful

resort, will only address overcrowding for a very short period of time.

In short order, even those solutions will be obsolete and every school

will be significantly beyond capacity.

It would be only a matter of time before Band-Aids such as split sessions

or the trimester system, which rotates students through some combination

of two out of three available semesters, would begin to create gaps in

academic delivery and compromise Fayette's educational product.

The committee continues to examine possible funding initiatives, too,

looking for more long-terms solutions in bricks and mortar. The committee

is still weighing the pros and cons to determine the merit of another

SPLOST vs. a bond. On Wednesday night, the Facilities Action Committee

will probably vote to recommend one or the other.

The superintendent, and ultimately the Board of Education, will hear the

committee's recommendation and have to render a decision that in

their view will best serve the needs of our students and be palatable

to the voting public.

Personally, I favor the bond, and have pledged my vote and my willingness

to assist in any way in the process, but the difficulty for the Board

and the Superintendent is that they must consider what the community as

a whole favors, and no one really knows the answer to that mystery. We've

tried the SPLOST (Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax) twice in the

past and failed at two different times in the year, each time in a special

election.

This time, should the committee, Dr. DeCotis, and the Board of Education

opt to pursue a funding initiative, we have available to us a general

election which promises to yield a higher voter turnout and the added

advantage of sparing taxpayers the expense of a special election.

The two different options, the SPLOST or the bond, really boil down, according

to Jim Stephens, director of finance for the Fayette school system, to

"where you are in life [young family or older retiree]," and

what your over