To the editor:

After reading the article about Bus Count Week in the Record on Saturday and reading the opinion page as well, my husband and I both came away thinking it sure sounds like the school district is encouraging parents and students to falsify the Bus Count in order to cheat the state out of revenue.

Are we encouraging our children to cheat in order to bilk money from the state by inaccurately loading the numbers of bus riders? Asking high school students to leave their cars at home and ride the bus only for three days to earn $54,000 illegally? I hope that the next lesson will not be how to get state disability insurance, or worse, how about lying to get food stamps.

The state should get it together and do this survey at random several times a year to get the real numbers, and the parents and school district should not preach to the kids to lie and cheat. We both found this to be the wrong message to send to our youth.

This effort does not benefit the moral values we want to teach our kids. How about coming up with a campaign to make it cool to ride the bus, save gas, not pollute the air and put fewer cars on the road? Maybe these are the values we should be encouraging.

Ken and Marye Kieling

Freeland