By AMY RILEY
One Citizen's Perspective

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

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