To the editor:

I worry that the bond issue, which puts long-overdue money into schools in east and south Lawrence, will fail because people wrongly assume that failure of the bond issue will prevent consolidation of elementary schools.

In fact, school closings can’t occur without a decision of the boundaries committee, and that decision will not be made by us when we vote “yea” or “nay” on the bond issue. Almost certainly schools will close whether the bond issue passes or not; budget problems and declining enrollments are not going away. But without the bond, there will be no improved schools to unite neighborhoods.

Instead, I fear, closings will occur willy-nilly, and we’ll see a proposal like the one we fought several years back, where kids from one school were to be shipped off to four different schools, without sensitivity to neighborhood integrity and to child psychology.

I worry that, without improvements, schools in central and east Lawrence, consolidated or no, will prove unattractive to families with children. Without improvements to those schools, property values will surely decline. The doughnut effect Mr. Davidson refers to will surely occur — school closings or no — unless we pass a bond issue that, finally, invests in schools in the older part of Lawrence.

Barbara Dinneen,

Lawrence