Elections are powerful.

But school redistricting may be the strongest man-made force to ever rip at a community.

I make these strange connections because of a challenge Gov. Jim Hunt issued to the state’s newspapers on Thursday night. Speaking at the N.C. Press Association’s annual awards ceremony, Hunt congratulated the state’s newspapers for their excellent coverage of Hurricane Floyd’s flood damage.

Hunt was not paying lip service. Many of us in the safe, dry confines of Salisbury cannot imagine what the people of eastern North Carolina went through. And as for the Post’s peers across the state, every newspaper staff in the region took heroic measures to gather and distribute the news.

They kept their communities posted on the latest news even as the news staffs themselves were reeling from the loss of family and friends, the destruction of their homes and overwhelming uncertainty.

But if you’ve followed Jim Hunt at all, you know he never passes up an opportunity to urge people to action. In this case, he challenged the newspapers to give the same kind of in-depth coverage and unblinking attention that they invested in the flooding to another subject: this year’s campaigns and elections.

He called for less horse-race calling and more discussion of the issues.

“The elections this year are important decisions,” Hunt said. “People need to know where the candidates stand and what kind of people they are.”

Agreed. And you’ll find nearly every newspaper in the state accepting that challenge because, frankly, that’s what we were planning to do, anyway. A free democracy depends on its newspapers for solid, thorough information, especially about campaigns. And a free press, in turn, depends on a thriving democracy.

But the Post won’t reserve its disaster-planning mode for hurricanes and elections. Rowan County faces another, just as pivotal event this year:school redistricting.

Most of us have been here before. We went through the redistricting that followed on the heels of merger. Now that the population has grown and a new middle school is going up, it’s time to redraw lines again.

Where those lines fall will have a big influence on future housing patterns and the equity of the schools. The Post’s role in this matter is to be sure citizens all across the county get the information they need to plug into the process and know what’s going on.

I’ll admit my bias up front. Our children attend Knox Middle School and Salisbury High School —not because we were involuntarily redistricted there by a school board, but because we chose to live in their attendance areas. We have never regretted that decision.

But what’s right for us may not be for others. We’ve warned our children that they may hear a lot of talk in the coming weeks about people who don’t want to go to Knox or Salisbury. Don’t take it personally, we tell them. We wouldn’t want to be redistricted, either.

But somebody has to, and we’re all fair game —especially those of us who live on the fringes of our attendance zones.

Homebuyers choose on the basis of several factors, and schools are at the top of the list. You literally buy into a district and then you support it. It is an action both practical and emotional. We become attached to our schools.

Tussling with those connections is something school board members and administrators are loathe to do. Maybe that’s why the proposal Dr. Joe McCann presented last Tuesday night was conservative.

It did not address the lagging attendance at North Rowan High School; apparently it lacked up-to-date capacity figures for that school. It may not have addressed Salisbury’s situation aggressively enough. And it certainly did a lot to upset the folks in Granite Quarry.

This is just the starting point.

We invite your letters, comments and questions on redistricting. The school system has said the same, and Page 7E of today’s Post carries a form you can send to the school offices for that purpose.

Redistricting won’t take lives or devastate an entire region like flooding. It can’t change the course of statewide history, like an election.

But when you start moving school district lines, you hit a tender nerve among some very dedicated public school supporters. They deserve solid information and a forum for sharing their views. The Post plans to provide just that.