I read with interest and some disbelief your editorial, "Bad behavior punished," in the Sunday's issue of the Eastern Wake News. The editorial attributes the result of the recent school board elections in several Wake County districts to "bad behavior" on the part of the majority of the board. As you explain it, "Voters expect a certain amount of decorum from their elected leaders and the new Republican majority set out from its first meeting to ram through its major priorities without giving an equal and fair opportunity for everyone to participate in the process."

Certainly, any fair observer who has followed even casually, the numerous and multiple hearings and open forums that the board has sponsored over the past year, would have seen something entirely different. The board gave ample opportunity for members and the general public to sound off and offer constructive suggestions, some of which have been incorporated into the present plan. The only lack of decorum was the rowdy and unruly neo-Marxist New Left protesters who repeatedly interrupted and shouted down the duly elected board members who were examining ways to return the control of our children's education to the parents, where it belongs.

But then this has been and continues to be the response of those minions and attack troops for the managerial and elitist New Leftist education bureaucrats, who for nearly 20 years have believed that they had some God-given right to run roughshod over the wishes of Wake County parents.

It is true that three of the four seats occupied by opponents of neighborhood schools have remained in the hands of those generally opposed to that policy. It is also true that the chair of the board was defeated, although the margin was quite close. But the unfortunate fact that both Democratic and Republican parties have gotten deeply involved, and that voter turnout was only about one in seven registered voters, leads me to think that better political organization and get-out-the-vote efforts had more to do with the result than real parental concerns.

The real issue for Wake County voters is whether they will trust their children to those educational elites who wish to use their children as pawns in a giant continuing experiment of social engineering; or, whether they will once again assert their God-given right to insist on genuine education and parental control.

Without the outside pressure groups, I think the parents and families in Wake County would choose traditional education over social engineering every time.

Dr. Boyd D. Cathey

Wendell