DeKalb More Than a Suburb

To the editors:

Talia Milgrom-Elcott's column "A Blurred Church and State Line" (Mar. 15) contains some notable pieces of misinformation.

First, she wrote "in DeKalb, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta." In fact, DeKalb is a county, not a suburb. The population of DeKalb county is 594,400. It contains many independent communities (including my town, Decatur) and some remaining rural areas.

Obviously there is no seditious intent in this misinformation, but the lack of specificity of names obfuscates her article. When it is unclear in which school serving the more than 90,000 students of the county "a young Dekalb student, Ronald Gaines" actually attended, her editorial loses credibility.

While I find Milgrom-Elcott's editorial interesting for bringing such an exemplary case of church-state co-existence in public schools, I do not care for her misinformation, however benign. Her vision of Dekalb county is tantamount to referring to all of the suburban parts of Middlesex county when referring only to Cambridge, glossing over this community's deserved autonomy from Boston proper. NATHANIEL W. BULLARD '00   March 16, 1998