The claim that charter school meetings can only be held in the St. Rocco Parish Hall is specious. It is simply unbelievable that any of the public school auditoriums or City Hall are booked every single night of every week.

But that isn't the most sneaky feature of the charter school drive. The real unaddressed, glossed over fact, is that the motivation for a charter school in Glen Cove is, plain and simple, a racial one.

We have all experienced the HMO (Managed Health Care) phenomenon. The operators of those are profit driven corporations. Their profits come from minimizing, as much as possible, the full services they promise their clients. Which is why physicians hate them. When HMOs begin to either lose money or aren't satisfied with their profit levels, they close up shop and walk away, leaving their enrollees high and dry, to run either to another HMO or to Medicare.

The Edison schools corporation, with which, we are told, a contract has been signed, is an MEO (Managed Educational Care) business just as profit motivated as the HMOs. The way for it to make money is to stint on education as much as possible. Promises, promises, it's still the same old bill of goods the HMOs made.

One hundred percent or 70 percent, it still will be all taxpayers who will foot the charter school bill. The public schools will suffer as a result.

Lee Drucker