Once again, I am compelled to write you to admonish you for publishing letters which are inflammatory and damaging to our community, especially when their contents are unfounded. Your recent publication of a letter by James Ward is yet another example of this practice.

It is doubtful that Mr. Ward's story of his daughter's college interview is based on anything but his own prejudice against the Levittown community. He claims that the colleges he recently visited nearly threw his daughter out when they heard she was from Levittown. The fact is that colleges are more eager than ever to accept and even recruit Levittown students with over 90 percent of Levittown students going on to college each year - most with scholarships of some sort. Every year many students from Division Avenue and MacArthur High Schools attend our country's most prestigious colleges and universities, including Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, etc., etc.

Mr. Ward also displays bias when he relates the school ratings, which he claims to have secured from a real estate sales service agency (the Multiple Listing Service and iPlace). Mr. Ward tells us that the companies that provide these ratings are "respected for their ability to collect the most accurate demographic information ..." Upon closer inspection, however, it appears that Mr. Ward only respects iPlace because it provides false data supporting his own prejudices.

What Mr. Ward doesn't tell is that iPlace also sells mortgages and has a vested interest in getting homebuyers to buy more expensive rather than less expensive homes. In his eagerness to discredit our fine community and its schools, Mr. Ward failed to tell us that the iPlace school ranking data are not based on student achievement data, but are derived, primarily, from the average sale price of homes in any given community; thus giving the impression to prospective homebuyers that, if you want good schools, you must pay a higher price for your home. True or false, such information leads homebuyers to buy more expensive homes, thus making it worthwhile for realtors to pay for the iPlace service in the first place.

In further covering up the inadequacies of his source of information, Mr. Ward did not tell us that the iPlace reports which he cited include blatantly false crime rates for these same communities. If a company cannot provide accurate information on something as specific as crime rates, how can we have any confidence in their rating on something as complex as the quality of our schools?

Mr. Ward does a great disservice to all of the Levittown community by undermining the hard work of our parents and citizens with unfounded and malicious propaganda. Furthermore, the Tribune does the Levittown a disservice by repeatedly giving a forum to these sorts of irresponsible attacks on our community's institutions. Our community deserves more responsible and more honest reporting from its local newspaper. When letters such as Mr. Ward's are received by the Tribune the editor should verify the accuracy of what such letters purport to be as facts, especially when the issue of accuracy has been brought to the editor's attention several times in the past.

Michael D. Moriarity
President, Levittown Board of Education