Dear Editors:
A recent letter to the editor of the Sun from Haddonfield resident Jeff Tucker expressed the hope that the Haddonfield Board of Education (BOE) be allowed to develop its nearly $50 million school buildings referendum without undue public criticism. Unfortunately, Mr. Tucker’s hope — which is commonplace, shared by all, and goes without saying — was overshadowed by a list of questionable caveats in his letter.
For example, Mr. Tucker claimed that opponents of the BOE’s $50 million proposal would spread an “avalanche of misinformation, innuendo, and false ‘facts’.” Evidently, the Haddonfield BOE’s President Glenn Moramarco disagrees with such alarmism, noting in a letter to the Sun last week, “we appreciate the attention the public has brought to our school buildings’ deferred maintenance both at recent hearings and for the past several years,” and that “in hindsight, after professional inspections, we realize public input was not as well considered as it could have been when residents previously called attention to deferred maintenance on the existing facilities.”
Mr. Tucker’s letter even suggested that residents who question certain aspects of a school bond proposal are demonizing our elected officials (as he put it, we are casting such officials as “evil-doers”). But sadly it is Mr. Tucker who is attempting to demonize anyone who dares question such public proposals.
Fact is we can and should expect dissent wherever there is controversy. Dissent is very healthy, as acknowledged recently by Mr. Moramarco and proven time and time again in Haddonfield. Like many taxpayers in town, I applaud my neighbors who make known their two-cents worth, and I respectfully disagree with Mr. Tucker that our neighbors cannot be trusted to do so “seriously, respectfully, and responsibly.”
Dissent is well worth the occasional hyperbole — even the hyperbole and pugnacity contained in Mr. Tucker’s letter.
Walter Weidenbacher
