The Fayette County Board of

Education made several hundred friends Monday night by doing nothing.

Swamped with phone calls and

e-mails from parents, the board has decided to put off plans for a third

elementary school and keep looking for land near the Peachtree City/Tyrone

border. The schools are being built as part of a five-year program funded

Cleveland Elementary in west

Fayetteville and Minter Elementary south of town are under construction,

and new boundaries based on those schools will go into effect next fall.

A new high school is scheduled to open in 2004-05, and new attendance

lines for both middle and high schools will go into effect then.

After taking public comment

in a hearing Monday night, the Board of Education plans to vote on attendance

districts for both of those scenarios in its regular business meeting

this coming Monday at 7 p.m.

But after 14 months of looking

in vain for a building site in the north Peachtree City/south Tyrone area,

the board had decided to put that school on the well-known Katz property

north of Ga. highways 54 and 74 on Peachtree City's west side.

The proposed Katz school site,

on land donated by John Wieland Homes as part of its deal with Peachtree

City to annex 80 acres earlier this year, lies to the west of the CSX

railroad tracks and to the north of existing Wynnmeade and Cedarcroft

subdivisions.

But when school boundary lines

based on a new school in that location were made public, that plan proved

to be highly unpopular.

Hundreds of residents of subdivisions

in Peachtree City's Kedron Village, among others, turned out for the school

board's public hearing on the new boundary lines Monday night, many of

them sporting buttons calling for changes in those lines.

Eighty signed up to speak,

which would have taken more than six and a half hours if each spoke for

the five minutes allowed.

But most deferred their comments

until later after learning that it's