Williams knows that. I think he plays it that way.

Sitting in his office in Garner's town hall talking about his town's battle with the Wake County school board, he starts off the conversation with this piece of wisdom: "This thing is like a flat pancake. It's got two sides."

Indeed it has.

Unfortunately for Williams, the Garner side tends to play poorly in the public realm.

The point of contention is the number of students from Southeast Raleigh attending Garner schools. It's easy to read it this way: The town doesn't want all these poor, mostly minority children coming in, bringing down its test scores and ruining its property values.

It sounds bad.

Williams knows that, too.

"Oh, I've been called a racist and all kind of mess," he said.

But on his side of the pancake, he sees Garner schools grappling with high numbers of students with significant challenges. Far higher than the 40 percent free or reduced lunch goal the schools aim for.

At Smith Elementary in Garner, Williams noted, more than 70 percent of the kids receive free or reduced-price lunches.

"That's not good for anybody," he said.

Williams acknowledges that some of that population comes from what he calls the "base population," meaning Garner.

The school system doesn't divide things up that way, Bill Poston, a spokesman for Wake schools explained.

"We run a countywide school system," Poston said. The "base" for some of the Garner schools is Southeast Raleigh. The two communities run right into one another.

But here's the thing that chaps Williams: In west Cary and Apex, some schools have a population of free-and-reduced-lunch kids that barely makes up 10 percent of their student bodies.

Those kids are missing out on the many benefits of a diverse school experience, Williams said. It's his position that if we're going to be diverse, every school in the county should share in the joys and challenges.

That's why Garner officials have thrown down the gauntlet, refusing to assist in the siting of other schools in their town until the school board responds to their demands and threatening to withhold the certificate of occupancy on two elementary schools undergoing renovations, including Smith. The school board has responded by saying it will withhold promised renovations at Garner schools.

Williams fears it could end in court. Concerned citizens in Garner have met with the lawyers who handled the suit that essentially led to the resegregation of Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools.

Williams said he doesn't want that. "Nobody wants to go back there," he said.

What he would like instead is for school board members to meet with him and the Garner aldermen to hash this thing out. No rhetoric, just honest talk.

School board chairwoman Rosa Gill has said she thinks such a meeting would be helpful, too. I called and e-mailed Gill for this column; she e-mailed me back that she would call, but I didn't hear from her on Friday.

Williams is waiting, too.

He said he looks forward to sitting down face to face.

"That'd be a real nice Christmas present," he said.