Good grief, I’m getting old. Another year has just flown by. It seems like just yesterday I was in junior high school listening to Prince (before he was briefly known as the little symbol) singing about partying like it was 1999.

At the time, 1999 seemed like it was a lifetime in the future. Today it seems more like a few lifetimes in the past.

It’s during times like these, as we transition from one calendar year to another, that we often consider what we’d like to do differently next year.

So where should we as a community strive to be in 2011? What should our collective New Year’s resolutions include?

Our community is in some ways at a crossroads. We’ve made amazing strides at beginning to overcome past wrongs by starting to work together on some key projects.

Those include the early stages of revamping the Natchez-Adams County EDA into the new Natchez Inc. and regionalism discussions with our friends in the area.

But our community is also facing some serious challenges ahead, too.

The separation of the haves and the have-nots in our community seems to grow with each passing year.

While some people attempt to turn that into a race issue, it isn’t. It’s economic class, not race, that’s at play.

Each side of the economic class struggle has valid concerns and, believe it or not, many similarities.

Both sides would likely agree that our community has too much crime. Investing more in our law enforcement efforts would be money well-spent — particularly if the public provided enough resources to incarcerate criminals for a long-enough time period to make their conviction meaningful.

Both sides would probably also agree that our area needs more jobs to help keep more people here instead of migrating elsewhere for work.

The best way to start to turn that is through education. It’s easy to write off the problems with our public education system as simple “someone else’s problem.”

Countless among us have summed up the problems with our public education system as simply “lack of parental involvement.”

While that symptom is at the heart of the matter, the question remains: What can we do about it?

Obviously, doing nothing is only making the situation worse. We’re not working with multiple generations of little parental involvement.

Our community needs to be pulling out all the stops to solve the education problem — from pushing through a community college tuition guarantee for county high school graduates to seriously considering what it would take to develop a charter school in Natchez.

Although we’ve made some minor improvements, we need fast, radical change and that will require making some huge leaps of faith by trying new things until we figure out a better formula.

Improving the average education level of our population will improve our community’s quality of life and marketability to outside business investors.

Studies show that as the education level goes up, so does the level of income — and thus the taxes paid, too —while the level of crime goes down.

Those two reasons alone should be motivation enough for everyone — even citizens with no history or likely future involvement with the public schools.

Shouldn’t we be working to ensure that we’re getting our money’s worth and focusing on the long-term?

Don’t forget how fast 1999 came along. The future will be here faster than we think. We need to be doing anything we can to shape that future today.

Kevin Cooper is publisher of The Natchez Democrat. He can be reached at 601-445-3539 or kevin.cooper@natchezdemocrat.com.