Editor, Gazette-Journal:

I would like to take this opportunity and feel compelled to address some of the cheap attacks made by Mr. Rusty West (a school employee) about my colleagues and me in his recently published piece in the Gazette-Journal. Mr. West’s alarming distortions of the facts are too many to mention in this letter, but I will attempt to address the more egregious ones.

First, I used an online survey tool (popularly used by the national media) to gauge the will of the taxpayer regarding their taxes. I fail to understand how Mr. West wrongly interpreted my survey as being just about the schools. As an Adjunct Professor of Finance at the Luter School of Business at Christopher Newport University, I have taught well over 300 students in sampling survey statistics used in business. Taxpayer dollars are very limited and the survey was designed to gauge citizen opinion on how much tax they were willing to pay.

In his piece, Mr. West disingenuously attacked and impugned m...