Anyone who knows anything about North Carolina's seventh-largest city has to see the humor in Caryites threatening to secede. Seceding Yankees? Howevah did they get in?

Scads of Cary folks are salt-of-the-earth Southerners, true enough. But more than a few of their (and my) neighbors have emigrated from places where restaurants don't make sweet tea, where people speed-talk like one of those radio pitchmen rushing through the fine print and where Billy Sherman is seen as someone who just did a nasty job that needed doing.

Plenty of Wake County's newer residents -- plenty of the folks who have sent our population dial spinning so crazily -- used to live in states where public school systems tend to be cozy little operations in teentsy little districts. The district might cover just a township (think of a county like Wake chopped into a dozen pieces, each with its own municipal government, police force and schools).

Such a district might contain one or two high schools, three or four middle schools, six or seven elementaries. The schools would be tucked into the fabric of stable neighborhoods, and there'd seldom be a question as to which one kids would attend. Lots of kids would walk or maybe ride their bikes. Wholesale reassignment of students from one school to another? Not going to happen, because there simply wouldn't be any need for it.

Coming from that kind of environment to the turbulence of Wake County, where the reassignment of several thousand students has become an annual ritual, understandably means a rough transition. It makes people wonder why all the shuffling is necessary and whether there possibly could be a better way.

And then they're told by the powers in charge that, sorry, you're just going to have to live with the situation, this being a fast-growing area and y'all being in the middle of the growth vortex, if not the cause of it. That's when people start thinking about seceding from Wake's countywide school system and starting their own.

Cary's mayor, Harold Weinbrecht, has stepped up to advise his constituents that firing on Fort Sumter, so to speak, would not be the smartest thing in the world. Not because Sheriff Donnie Harrison would have to send in his deputies to quash the rebellion, but because setting up an independent Cary school system would be so doggone expensive.

Even with the aggravation of reassignments, being part of an excellent countywide school system means big benefits to folks in western Wake. The school system's reputation, in fact, is one of the county's main growth drivers. It has helped everybody ride the crest of rising property values and prosperity in general.

But this brings us to a chief complaint among those who dread the reassignment hassles: Filling new schools isn't the only reason students are shifted about. The school board also wants to distribute students from lower-income families among schools in different communities, and throughout the county.

Don't be shocked, but this is the real bone of contention.

The board, and its supporters such as the Wake Education Partnership, lean heavily on the argument (buttressed by research) that students from poorer families are harmed when they are corralled in schools where the concentrations of such students are high. Better to spread them out among schools where the socioeconomics are more upscale. Anybody who can't understand why this should be so isn't trying very hard.

But some parents can't be blamed for wondering: Wouldn't a class with uniformly high demographics have an even better chance to succeed? And if that's the case, isn't that what we should want for our child?

It may be, as the Wake Education Partnership asserts, that middle-class students' performance doesn't suffer when some poorer kids are scattered into middle-class schools. But for parents who want to maximize their children's prospects, the allure of a school filled with the offspring of the economically elite must be strong.

So we gain a glimpse inside the mind of a Cary school secessionist. This is really just someone who wants the best for his or her child, right at that moment, because as they see it the child only gets one chance.

But in a larger sense, everybody who lives in Wake County has gained from the emphasis on keeping schools first racially, then socioeconomically diverse. The school system has done that while obtaining impressive academic results, and while keeping costs down. This is a classic case where elected officials responsible for the schools properly have kept their focus on upholding the larger public interest.

Just imagine, fellow Caryites, if Abe Lincoln's response to those South Carolina hotheads had been, "Good riddance!" Strength lies in unity, after all, along with the recognition that a society, or community, is only as strong as its weakest link.