Across the street. Next door. Students in more than half the 11 homes she can see from her front yard in Lilburn have earned HOPE scholarships. Other kids on her block -- where houses sell for more than $300,000 -- qualified for the award but passed it up for out-of-state schools.

Byron, 53, says she spends a few dollars a week on the Georgia Lottery -- the source of HOPE funding. It's just a game, she says.

"Nobody in this neighborhood would stand in line to buy a ticket," she says.

But for Willie Collins, it's more than that -- it's a dream he spends up to $350 a week to chase. Collins, 62, sometimes steps around the derelicts outside the S&N Superette on Glenwood Road in southwest DeKalb County, where he waits his turn to buy a ticket.

The retired bricklayer favors scratch-off Lucky 7's, Cash 3, Cash 4 and Mega Millions. He wins some of his money back in small prizes but has only won one big one. "I won $1,800 once," he says. "But ever since then, I haven't really won."

HOPE rarely touches Collins. He's never met anyone in his community -- where most homes sell for less than $100,000 -- who has won a HOPE scholarship, though his grandchildren attended a lottery-funded pre-kindergarten program.

"People around here don't really think about where the money goes," he says as he scratches off a shiny ticket with his thumbnail. "It's more about trying to win."

Lottery links strangers

Willie Collins and Donna Byron are strangers, but their communities are inextricably linked by the lottery.

Players in Collins' neighborhood subsidize the college education of kids like those in Byron's neighborhood, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis shows.

Collins lives in the 30032 ZIP code, which is mostly black and below average in income. Byron lives in the 30047 ZIP code, mostly white and above average in income.

People in Collins' ZIP code won about three times as much from the lottery -- a strong indicator of how much they play -- as the people in Byron's ZIP code in 2002. Byron's ZIP code received four times as much money in HOPE scholarships as Collins' ZIP code.

Collins' ZIP code has the highest lottery winnings in Georgia, while Byron's has the most HOPE scholarships.

The same pattern plays out across the state: Poor lottery players are paying the tuition, fees and book expenses of better-off Georgians.

Charles Clotfelter, a Duke University economics professor who has studied state lotteries for nearly 20 years, is convinced.

"HOPE is a program financed out of the pockets of the poor," Clotfelter says. It is "a middle- and upper-class entitlement program. The state of Georgia made its choice in that."

Sen. Zell Miller, who launched HOPE in 1993 when he was Georgia's governor, says he disagrees. He says the lottery is simply a diversion for the people who play it.

Players "buy that lottery ticket instead of buying People magazine or the National Enquirer," Miller says. "They buy that lottery ticket instead of a six-pack sometimes. They buy that lottery ticket instead of going to a baseball game."

Poor play, benefit little

The areas where people tend to play the lottery most and benefit least from HOPE are substantially poorer than areas that receive the most HOPE scholarships, the newspaper's analysis shows.

Last year, the 20 ZIP codes in Georgia with the most lottery winners had household incomes of $36,100, lower than the state's median of $42,400.

In the 20 ZIP codes with the most HOPE recipients, household incomes were 72 percent higher than in the lottery winners' ZIP codes, and the better-off ZIP codes received 2 1/2 times as many HOPE scholarships.

The lottery's reliance on the poor is probably greater than the newspaper's analysis shows.

It includes only winners who claimed $600 or more in prizes, which requires them to provide their addresses to the Georgia Lottery Corp. for tax purposes.

Yet it doesn't take into account people who play Cash 3, which has a jackpot of $500. Cash 3, similar to a once popular illegal numbers game called "the Bug," is the lottery's biggest single game, dwarfing better-known jackpots like Mega Millions and Lotto South. Like its illegal predecessor, Cash 3 is played heavily by blacks and poor people, according to retailers and former lottery employees.

Lottery officials say they have never tried to analyze the demographics of their market.

Rebecca Paul, Georgia's longtime lottery chief, who recently left to run Tennessee's new lottery, says she didn't have to. "We don't know who our players are. We market to everyone 18 and over," she says. "The bottom line is about fun. We don't have a magic formula."

Nevertheless, Robyn Cook, a former researcher for the Georgia Lottery under Paul's leadership, says lottery officials knew more about the demographics of players than they've admitted.

Reliance on poor debated

Data collected for the lottery in the 1990s showed that Cash 3 relied on lower-income players, Cook says. The data were based on telephone surveys done every week for more than two years, she says.

She says her bosses didn't want the data leaking to the public, telling her to keep only electronic records and put nothing on paper.

"They were afraid," Cook says.

Cook says she believes Georgia Lottery officials when they say the lottery hasn't tried to target low-income players with advertising. But Cook surmises that lottery officials feared a public relations problem if the demographic results got out and the lottery looked as if it relied heavily on poor people. Lottery officials deny Cook's claims.

Concerns that the lottery would siphon money from poor people were raised before voters approved the lottery in 1992, but the lottery got heavy support from poor urban neighborhoods.

Lottery proponents insisted that the typical lottery player was white and middle-class.

State Rep. Douglas Dean (D-Atlanta) says he never was a fan of the lottery -- in part because he feared lower-income people wouldn't get a fair share of education programs.

Ten years in, Dean says he's seen the transfer of wealth firsthand.

"There's no reason we should be giving somebody whose family makes $200,000 or $300,000 a year a free college education," he says. "To them, the scholarship is just a luxury."

The Rev. Cynthia Hale, senior pastor at Ray of Hope Christian Church, which pulls many of its members from the southwest DeKalb area, says the lottery offers "unreasonable hope."

She likes the scholarship program, but not how the money has been distributed.

"I am appalled by the fact that it doesn't benefit more students out of our community," Hale says. "So much of our money comes out of our neighborhood, it needs to come back proportionately."

The state should reinstate an income cap for HOPE eligibility, she says and people in lower-income areas should take more responsibility for ensuring that children get good grades and are prepared for college.

While much of the lottery money used for education has been spent on HOPE scholarships, the lottery also funds programs that may benefit people with low incomes more than the scholarships have.

The state's pre-k program, which sends 4-year-olds to school early to prepare them for kindergarten, is open to all Georgians. And HOPE grants pay for tuition at technical colleges regardless of the student's high school grades or family income. The grants more often go to low-income students.

Yet the HOPE grant program pays out significantly less than the HOPE scholarship program.

Some argue HOPE helps all

Don Burrell, a father who lives in Lilburn, believes HOPE is a fair way of helping all students, regardless of family income or race. Burrell says that for many poor lottery players, helping pay for HOPE "is one way they are giving back to the community for the first time in their lives."

"Why is it that good things from the government always have to go to the poor people?" he asked.

Moreover, no one forces poor people to play the lottery, he says.

But the Georgia Lottery does spend heavily to convince Georgians it's a good idea.

It shells out more than $26 million a year for advertising, marketing and merchandising. Last year the Georgia Lottery bought more advertising from TV stations in metro Atlanta than any business other than Chevrolet, according to CMR, a firm that tracks advertising spending.

The message is also on radio -- where the lottery is a top 10 advertiser buying from metro Atlanta stations -- and along roadsides, where the lottery promises fun and riches on 160 billboards.

The pitches seem to have worked. In the last decade, lottery sales have totaled $20.1 billion.

Much of the money comes from a small percentage of heavy lottery players. Most Georgians -- about two-thirds -- say they spend $50 or less a year, according to a new poll by Zogby America and the Journal-Constitution. If this is true, then the other third would have to spend at a much higher rate to account for the $365 yearly average spent by Georgia adults.

Doug Herrin, a fifth-year senior at the University of Georgia, works at an Athens convenience store where he collects lottery ticket dollars from regulars.

The 25-year-old economics major says the scholarship money he got for four years was nice, but it had little to do with his decision to go to college.

"All the time, moms come in and cash their welfare and child support checks and buy tickets," he says. "Bums hand me a quarter, three dimes, a handful of pennies, whatever they've got on them so they can play. They're just buying a dream."

Herrin says he feels bad for the players and tries to make sure they know they're appreciated.

"I look them in the eye and tell them thanks for paying my tuition."