From: Charles R. Coombs \ Internet: (crcoombs@telepath.com)

To: Larry A. Rice \ Internet:

Subject: Returning your call . . .

Hi, Larry
I'm the Charlie Coombs who got the letter published in last Wednesday's Oklahoman. Thanks for your call and for your interest in educational reform.

The paper usually prints this -- they publish most of my letters -- but they left out this time that I'm chairman of the Committee for Oklahoma Educational Reform (COER), an organization that seeks to return our public schools to local, parental control, and to put public schools into competition with each other as well as with private schools by means of a voucher system.

The COER Home Page at http://www.telepath.com/crcoombs has been in existence for nearly two years now. We have many of our newsletters out there, along with our brochures, some useful information anent the NEA, and our proposed amendment to the Oklahoma State Constitution which will make meaningful reform here possible. We've been working on the plan for over seven years now, and have had it vetted by attorneys from the Institute for Justice, Center for Law and Justice, and The Heritage Foundation, among others. We know it will pass legal and constitutional muster if our courts have not throroughly subverted everything we now recognize as justice by the time we get it passed.

You need the Adobe Acrobat Reader, version 3.0 to read most of the documents on the page. The COER Home Page has a link to Adobe from whom you can download the software free. To install it, you need only run the executable you get when you download. I'm working on getting our files in other formats as well, but life is full and time is short. If you just can't use Acrobat 3.0, let me know and I'll realign priorities.

I'm also involved with Dr. Jim Turner and Russ Reinhart in Interface Publishing Company, a self-publisher's service company like Vantage Press designed to help writers get their works into print. Jim has written a book on Secular Humanism, and Russ has at least two books on the Constitution and constitutional law. I'm a novelist. We're trying to use the marketing resources of the Internet to help our authors sell their works, and we'd be interested in looking at anything you might want to publish this way. Our concentration is on traditional American values of freedom, duty, honor, God, and country -- unprintable stuff like that.

I'm sorry I got your call too late to change my itenerary, but I'm going to Mexico this weekend to look at printers and stuff. In future, I'll plan to head that way through Lawton, which will let me pass through Wichita Falls. Perhaps we can do lunch.

I'll set a link to your page from the COER Home Page the next time I maintain it. Meantime, I hope you'll set a link to us.

Tandem vincitur,

Charlie Coombs
http://www.telepath.com/crcoombs

Click here to see COER Home Page

E-mail to Charlie Coombs Chairman of Committee for Oklahoma Educational Reform, COER.