Please review your journalistic standards as a result of your placing the tragic suicide of a West Linn High School student at the top, or anywhere else, in the top 15 stories about our outstanding community in 2012.

Neither that child’s family nor her classmates need to be reminded of her sad demise. Secondly, please advise Mr. Wallace that based upon my own 35-year teaching career I can say with some authority that most students exhibit far more nice than naughty.

Only seven years of my career were spent teaching adolescent learners, only a very small number of whom proved to be anything but as delightful as they were challenging, and in a positive fashion at that.

My other 28 years were spent teaching mostly very high-security adult inmates of five maximum -security prisons. Given their records of violent and even heinous crimes, had they not been challenging in a positive way, I can assure you that I would not be alive to write this letter.

Ray D. Taylor

West Linn