School board misguided in its attempt at message control

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following letter was also sent to each member of the Burke County Board of Education and is directed to them:

TO THE EDITOR:

Thank you for recording your meetings on YouTube. Have the voters of Burke County unknowingly elected Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to the Burke County Board of Education?

Much like media restrictions recently imposed by the Pentagon, you have approved a censorship resolution which smacks of institutional arrogance and petty retribution.

Your justification? A documented pattern of inaccurate reporting. Other than clarification of the 2.4% revenue decrease (which The Paper has now corrected), you offer not a single example of the inaccurate reporting pattern from Mr. Wycoff’s alleged treasure trove of exhibits.

I ask you now. Where are they? Did all of you read them before approving your resolution?

If you cannot commit to no layoffs, and you publicly utter that phrase as well as all manner of synonyms, why are you so scared of its use in a news story headline?

According to Superintendent Swan, the L-word in a headline “caused a little bit of an uproar within our staff.”

That seems to justify your resolution while in a public meeting the finance director perfunctorily displays a spreadsheet listing various cost saving initiatives under consideration.

It includes words like eliminate, split, consolidate, and cut. You audaciously request The Paper not publish those images.

Next comes unwarranted and highly suspicious retaliatory action against The Paper because a headline uses a word you yourselves utter publicly. A duck by any other name is still a duck.

You insult the intelligence of school staff by blaming their uproar on a news organization instead of inconsistent comments and cost-saving initiatives developed and presented by system officials.

Reasonably prudent citizens who care about our schools will be denied unscripted reporting from a professional media outlet.

Employers considering Burke County will want to know more about our public schools. Guess where they will look for information?

It will not be the press releases generated by your PR staff. It will be the newspaper focused entirely on Burke County. The organization you want to punish instead of partner with.

The most egregious harm is to the students you purport to protect and serve. Like so many good stories created each week, the innovative students at Heritage Middle School cannot tell us about their community focused projects.

Shame on you.

The Paper is not the source of harm to our community. What harms our community is your misguided attempt at message control.

Thank you.

KEN CORN