Citizens hardly ‘split’ down middle

I believe a poor choice of words was used in the March 5 and March 10 headlines, “Marysville split on ouster” and “Marysville split on school chief severance deal,” respectively.

The headlines and the stories, gave uninformed readers the impression Marysville is more or less evenly divided over the removal of Linda Whitehead from the job of superintendent in the Marysville School District. Nothing could be further from the truth.

A “split” can be 50-50, which was a reasonable assumption to make in the context the headlines. However, a split can also be 90-10.

While there certainly are opinions on all sides of this issue, both headlines were a bit misleading about the actual support in Marysville for Whitehead, which has continued to decline over the past six months. Some people would dispute this fact, but then so did Mark Johnson, Cary Peterson and Eric Olson. In light of the fact their opponents in last November’s school board election ran on a platform of removing Whitehead, the citizens of Marysville made it crystal clear how they felt about Whitehead by voting each of the three off the school board by nearly a 2-to-1 margin. Marysville is split all right, but not right down the middle.

Marysville