Re: Residents to Support School Bond [Village News, 8/9/2018]

In last week’s issue of the Village News, you had a front page story with the headline ‘Residents pledge support to school bond”. Familiar with the ongoing issue, the plea for funding of a high school in Fallbrook for Bonsall students to be located on Gird Road, I was unsurprised to read that they were looking to get the bond back on the ballot this November.

What did surprise me was the one-sidedness of the peculiar arguments it made for the school. It talked about the “outpouring of support”, yet mentioned just “more than 100 residents” as supporting it. It emphasized safety, citing the Lilac Fire, claiming “We barely got all those kids off the campus…”. I don’t recall reading anything about the kids being in danger in this manner.

It also rambled about ‘education is important for careers and college’ (duh), plus makes a bizarre claim that Bonsall housing values have not increased in the last “six or eight years” (and that the lack of this new high school was to blame). I see nothing to suggest housing values have not increased in Bonsall, as has surrounding communities, over that period of time.

Doing some research on the origin of this skewed, one-sided news story, I was told this was a “press release” from the Safe and Strong Bonsall Schools organization, the same group sponsoring this upcoming bond measure.

This article mimics the structure of a typical news story, with various people being quoted and various points of view being emphasized. It appears like it was created to intentionally fool the reader, masquerading as a news story that the Village News curated. It is at best an OpEd piece, at worst propaganda, and should have either been in that section of the paper or have had included a clear label that it was a press release from their organization.

Roy Batchelor