Shawne Randlett

To the editor,

Ron Tunning, you should have ended your column (Plain Speaking, 8/29) three paragraphs earlier than you did. Had you done so you might have kept your comments within the confines of the familiar Hatfield/McCoy relationship you enjoy with Niel Young, so delicatelyplayed out (like a junior high food fight) between the pages of The Sun every now and then.

Your final remarks, however, destroyed any hopes you may have had to claim the moral high ground over Mr. Young, and effectively pushed your own foot firmly into your mouth. They also confirmed for the public just how closed your ears are to the voices of so many taxpayers in this community.

Mr. Tunning, you expressed how angry you are with Mr. Young for accusing you and the rest of the Building Committee of having a "preconceived plan" and a hidden agenda to build new schools out on Parade Road right from the beginning. You have protested that such was not the case, and you insist that the Committee's motives were untainted by bias and presuppositions. However, you then assert that Jenny Watson's motive for opposing the Parade Road plan and supporting the tax cap is that she is driven by a "detestation of public education."

You may argue publicly and privately with Mr. Young or Mr. Verhoeks according totheir stated views all you like, butplease tell us in a column, Mr. Tunning, when have you spoken with Mrs. Watson about this issue? Have you asked her about her personal opinion of public education? Has she volunteered her views on this issue in any public forum? Have you queried her concerning her family's reasons for choosing an alternative method of educating their children? Perhaps you are not aware of the many possible reasons a family might choose an educational method other than thepublic schools. Here are a few:the desire the give a child a faith-based education, a parent's occupation that requires frequent relocating might make public school enrollment difficult,a child may have a severe chronic health condition that is better managed by home education, a parent may wish to remove a child from a detrimental peer group in order to keephim or herfrom delinquent behavior patterns,or a child may have either learning disabilities or may be unusually gifted and is better served in a different learning environment. Now let me engage in a little plain speaking of my own. The truth is, you are unaware of the reasons her children are not in the public schools (not that it is any of your business anyway) and you are making assumptions about her motives for rejecting the Parade Road plan and supporting a tax cap only because she homeschools. These are same kind of assumptions that so get up your nose when Mr. Young makes them about your own motivations.

I would have thought that as careful as you were to get Ms. Cunningham's own words about her position, you would certainly have been as careful to ascertain Mrs. Watson's motivation for hers. In fact, you would not have had to engage in a great deal of legwork for such a task.It has been clear in every letter she has written and in every statement she has made in a public forum thatshe has been opposedto the Parade Road plan as a resident who receives a tax bill twice a year and cannot tighten the family budget much further. She has never taken the platform as a homeschool parent who foundationally detests public education in principle. You owe her a public apology for publicly suggesting such in your column.

Your editorial alsoaffirmed once again that you and others so enamored of the failed Parade Road plan just do not hear what a large portion of the opposition is telling you. Theycannot afford higher property tax bills! What part of this bit of English prose do you not understand? You have been repeatedly told by so many that they live with drafty windows shrink-wrapped for winter, that they drive vehicles manufactured well back into the last century, rarely can afford a vacation where they actually "vacate," clip coupons, depend on thrift store bargains, and wonder how they will be able to keep their houses warm and their cars fueled at whatever the prices will be tomorrow. And yet Mrs. Cunningham wants another buck a day from "the average household." Here's some breaking news:struggling working familiesand the elderly can barely keep $362 in their checking account. (I added the extra $10 for the nifty new beach sticker handed down to us by City Council this year.)

Mr. Tunning, seeing how you did all that research calling around school board members, etc. to see where their kids go to school, why not spend some time poring over the 614 signatures of all the Laconia taxpayers who signed the tax cap petition?It might prove to be an interesting demographic study. You could find out how many of those tax bill recipients represent those aforementioned struggling families, how many are elderly and on fixed incomes, and of course, most importantly forthe purposes of distraction from the real point, how many have kids in the public schools and how many have chosen an educational alternative.

I should warn you though, to be fair. You will find the signature of at least one other homeschooling mom on that petition. Mine. Last year I taught myteenage sonsIntroductory Logic. While going over the lesson called "Fallacies of Distraction," they learned about the Ad Hominem attack usedin an attempt todiscredit a person (rather than engaging their argument) by name-calling and poisoning the well of public opinion against them. No one could have guessed just how much prophesying I was doing last spring when teaching them this lesson. I made up an example of an ad hominem fallacy by writing on the board, "Don't listen to that resident's argument against the school plan. She doesn't have kids in the public school, and therefore her points are invalid." I am pleased to say that my boys were astute enough to see how this tactic diverted attention from the fact that the resident in the example was a taxpayer and a voter, and that her arguments should be dealt with according to their validity and truth value. However, rather than deal with real arguments and do all that icky logical thinking, it's just so much easier to use irrelevant information about a person, invent a motive to incite suspicion, attack them publicly, and then call it "plain speaking."

Shawne Randlett

Laconia