Editor:

I attended the Fairhope City Council meeting on Sept. 28. The Fairhope City Council stated that they had not entertained the idea of appropriating $25,000 to study whether or not Fairhope should secede from the county-provided school system and create its own educational system.

For the city to take the position that it must form its own system would require a prerequisite understanding that the current education being provided by the county is sub-standard and failing. However, this is not the case.

While the Baldwin County Board of Education is experiencing financial difficulties, it has managed to provide and maintain good schools in the city of Fairhope and its peripheral, outlying areas. For example, Fairhope High School is considered among the best county high schools, the K-1 Center has long been lauded for its achievements and Newton Elementary was recently named the No. 1 school in the county for its many technological advancements in the classroom. Fairhope schools, by virtue of their staffs and fortunate support groups like FEEF, are an anomaly among a struggling system of schools in one of the largest counties in America.

It is apparent that the Fairhope school system is not broken. As a former educator and father of two girls in the system, I look forward to their advancement in what I would consider model public schools. Furthermore, if the City Council wants to act to control future classroom sizes and the inevitable escalating costs associated with brick and mortar improvements, they could choose to enforce the Fairhope Master Plan that states clearly that we are to remain a small city. By continually growing the community through repeated neighborhood development permit issuance, we inevitably place more children in an already encumbered county system.

Fairhope