To the Editor:

I am not writing to relitigate the school board's vote. It was taken in March, in public, by people I know and mostly like, for reasons I understand and cannot honestly call wrong. I am writing so that one number is in the newspaper before the season ends, because after Labor Day nobody will want to hear it.

My season is ten weeks. That is not a complaint, it is the arithmetic of a lake that freezes. Everything — the payroll, the roof, the dock repairs, the insurance, the twenty-two units, the four cabins, my own household — comes out of ten weeks, and the last of those ten is the week before Labor Day. This year that week is a school week. Statewide, the industry's testimony for thirty years has been that families are about half as likely to book an August week once school has started, and I can tell you that our own bookings for that week came in at a little over half of last year's, which is close enough to the testimony that I no longer think the testimony was exaggerated.

Here is what I want understood. Nobody did this to me on purpose. The holiday fell late, the Legislature offered an option, and our board took it for good reasons involving February and the second week of June. I would probably have voted the same way if my job were school and not lodging.

But a decision made for good reasons still has to be paid for by somebody, and this one is being paid for by about nine businesses on this Chain and the people they employ, most of whom are somebody's kid working their first job. That is worth saying out loud once, in the paper, in August, while the evidence is still sitting in my booking calendar.

The board takes it up again next spring for 2027. I will be there. I will not be angry. I would just like the week counted before it is voted away a second time.

R. FontaineLoon Ridge

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