To the Editor:

Infamous Educate Worthington is again misleading rather than educating. Now it's John Herrington choosing to "connect the dots" (Worthington News, July 23), but only those dots convenient to his biases. And his "dots" ignore "dots" such as overall school quality, sustaining a high-quality and stable teaching staff, maintaining home values, expanding opportunities for students and more.

I agree with one of Herrington's points: Taxpayers need to be part of the picture. In fact, they are the bottom line when levies are submitted. A primary duty of the board and central administration is to determine what the majority of citizen-voters want of their schools and how progress will be judged. Then they must establish what it will cost, including staffing, to produce the desired outcomes.

Correctly, Herrington says that more than 80 percent of public school budgets represent employee costs. What else would they represent in a heavily personnel dependent endeavor? Teacher quality is the No. 1 determinant of student learning. It's certainly not where corners should be cut unless that's really not a "dot" you care about.

No bargained contract, despite its attractiveness to the employees, protects those employees from community unwillingness to pay for it. Look at school layoffs across the state, all with union contracts. Cleveland recently laid off more teachers than Worthington employs.

Herrington's letter, connecting only his favorite dots, does anything but "educate Worthington." Current union negotiations do mean a lot. They may well determine programs to be offered, appropriately staffed and well run, and also your home value as markets tumble.

Finally, we'll get what we pay for, no matter what the contract says. And to educate Herrington, it's a "labor management" contract. It's an agreement between two parties, of which the union is only one. It sets the provisions upon which one side provides services in order to address the other side's service needs and expectations. Good contracts address legitimate issues of both parties. And taxpayers (those who vote) are always part of any agreement because they'll either sustain it or not.

It'd be nice if we could vote directly on some other "dots" like credit rates, oil prices and speculation, nation-building occupations, government eavesdropping, hiring mercenaries to do our warring, bailing out failing private ventures with millionaire executives, and on and on. But we're left to vote directly on public education support, and it does amazingly well, given that predictably unsettling factor. Then again, maybe the private sector and more of our government's functions would do better if we got to vote regularly and directly on whether to sustain them or not.

Bob Barkley