How should Macon Bibb County's Board of Elections deal with a plan to cut 1/3 of the county's voting precincts? That's among the hot topics GPB's Leah Fleming and Telegraph editorial page editor Charles Richardson hash out in this edition of Macon&Eggs.

HOT TOPIC #1
Bibb County Board of Elections needs to cut $40,000 from its budget. They say the best way to do that is cut about 1/3 of voting precincts. NAACP officials in Georgia say the plan disenfranchises black voters and those without cars. A public hearing held recently was well attended and passionate. Richardson says there are two issues. One is money. One is poll worker volunteers. "Experienced poll workers are in short supply. If you have fewer polls you need fewer workers. You save money. The question is how are elections officials deciding which polls to close? What is the criteria", asks Richardson. This month officials plan to vote on the matter.

HOT TOPIC #2
The owner of Wings Café has agreed to close the club for 2 years after a shooting on December 12, leaving three dead and three wounded. Five people were arrested on murder charges and one for theft. Many Macon Bibb officials say the gang activity associated around the club obviously indicates a problem with the surrounding community as a whole, as opposed to the establishment itself.
"Gangs are like roaches", says Richardson. "Once you shine a light on them they hide, but they are still there." Over the weekend Macon Bibb Commissioner Virgil Watkins hosted a community forum which included experts from around the state to talk about ways to reduce gang activity in Macon. Watkins has said Macon needs to address poverty, blight and lack of education in the area's high risk neighborhoods.

HOT TOPIC #3
There have been a number of studies done that show that the academic performance of children from two parents exceeds that of children from single parent household. Charles looked at that in his opinion piece this week:
Falling in the gaps
By Charles E. Richardson - The Telegraph

GAP: An incomplete or deficient area; a break in continuity; a problem caused by some disparity.
-- Merriam Webster

There are all kinds of gaps -- income, education, nutritional, etc. -- but the one I see as the most important is the parental gap. If there is a parental gap, there is a greater chance you also will have the other gaps. They seem to run in a pack.

While there are all kinds of studies that show children in stable, two-parent homes achieve higher marks in school than children coming from single-parent households, none of the studies I’ve read can declare with certainty which gap (income, parental, etc.) has the most sway. And since gaps stand side by side, in most cases, which one do we want to eliminate first?

I say we take aim at the parental gap. It’s my belief that if we attack that gap, the others eventually will die on the vine. The parental gap is a foundational gap that gives birth to many of the other gaps.

We are in trouble because that parental gap gets bigger with every birth, particularly in the black community, where seven of 10 births are to unwed mothers. So when we say children have to stop having children, that is entirely correct, but statistics show that it’s not just teenagers having babies without a husband around. How do we address that? The short answer is, we can’t, but there are two approaches open to us.

According to the Center for Children and Families, there are two basic ways to address the parental gap. Both ways have been tried here at one time or another. One way is to build the skills of parents, and the other is to supplement their efforts through mentoring, early childhood day care and programs like KIPP. Remember the Saturday Parent University sessions? Remember the work with parents at the Welcome Center? Each school now has a staff person that’s supposed to reach out to parents and get them involved with their children’s education and maybe open the door for more advancement by the parents. Just because there is an income gap does not mean there has to be a parental gap.

For example, I don’t know about you, but my mother was a nurse who worked the graveyard shift. We never had a new car, just a series of jalopies. There were times we didn’t have a car. Was there income disparity? Sure, but there was no parental gap, and that’s why I am where I am today. Nothing changes overnight, but my mother’s sacrifices have paid off for me.

Needless to say, you don’t want any sort of gap, but the gaps we see today are entirely predictable. We have several generations of boys and girls who have never seen a functional family with a father and mother living in the same house. The absence of one parent, usually the father, means the family’s engine is working twice as hard to maintain speed. Twice as hard to get the kids to and fro. Twice as hard to check homework and prepare meals and talk to teachers. That produces one tired engine.

I wish it was as easy as waving a magic wand, and in a puff of smoke, wedding bells would start ringing and divorce would disappear, but that’s not happening, so what do we do? Solving the parental gap is one of the issues that is at the point of the spear for all of the agencies that signed up to work together at the Promise Center. We can’t eliminate poverty without addressing the parental gap. We can’t eliminate all of the other issues we face, particularly in blight-stricken Macon, without parental leadership.

I won’t suppose to tell you how this came to be. I will say it didn’t use to be this way. When children are allowed to grow like weeds in a field, we get the predictable results: more crime, less growth, more civic unrest.

Those who are committed to addressing our ills have to be committed to eliminating the parental gap as well. It’s a long-term commitment that must be undertaken, or this community will continue to suffer the consequences.

Charles E. Richardson is The Telegraph’s editorial page editor. He can be reached at 478-744-4342 or via email at crichardson@macon.com. Tweet@crichard1020.

Contributors: Charles Richardson, Telegraph editorial page editor