Re today’s front page article about the BoE selling or keeping 33 acres: ”If the property were sold, the school system would have to build new detention ponds, since the current ones....”
It would be a shame if the BoE got rid of the detention ponds because the school then would not have places to dunk unruly students who had to stay after school.
I believe the writer meant retention ponds. Webster’s cites retention as the act of retaining or keeping (in this case, water), which would certainly be more appropriate to the subject than the vision of miscreants bobbing up and down.
One other typo: On A3, the caption under the Art Club’s visit to the High Museum: I believe they viewed the Louvre Atlanta Exhibition. (That one slipped by!)
Thanks for a good laugh.
Jill Bigler
Peachtree City, Ga.

[Editor’s note: I have no excuse for our error about the great Paris art museum. But I must demur to your Webster’s definition on types of ponds. From the U.S. Department of Energy’s website, the following: “A retention pond is designed to hold a specific amount of water indefinitely. Usually the pond is designed to have drainage leading to another location when the water level gets above the pond capacity, but still maintains a certain capacity. A detention pond is a low lying area that is designed to temporarily hold a set amount of water while slowly draining to another location. They are more or less around for flood control when large amounts of rain could cause flash flooding if not dealt with properly.”
A second explanation from the Newton site: “A water detention pond, by definition, detains water. When an area is paved, or covered with a building, water runs off the property much faster than when it is in a natural state. The total amount of discharge is the same, but the discharge happens over a shorter amount of time. A hydrologist will design a water detention pond to temporarily detain the water and keep the runoff to the desired rate. When the rain ends, though, the water detention pond will be empty shortly afterwards. A water retention pond, on the other hand, retains water all the time. The pond level may go up and down, but ordinarily the pond has some water in it. So, if the pond is typically empty except during and shortly after rain or other precipitation, it is a detention pond. If the pond always has water in it, then it is a retention pond.”]