Editor,

In his role as Yelm’s health emergencies manager, Dr. Brian Keay asked JZ Knight to meet in 2006 regarding the Washington state Department of Public Health Director’s Pandemic Program, which set protocols in the event of an outbreak of viruses.

Knight was represented by RSE teacher/student Dr. Karriem Ali and myself where Keay requested Knight’s position on two issues:

1. Would Knight allow RSE’s campus to serve as an area quarantine site during a pandemic (SARS fears were high then)?

2. With the school then bringing to Yelm a large contingent of international students, would RSE continue to operate during a pandemic?

Dr. Ali said that while the campus could serve up to 2,000 people, it did not possess multiple isolation rooms, sanitary hand-washing facilities, or medicine and food preparation areas necessary to be considered an adequate medical quarantine facility. Dr. Keay was also informed that RSE would shut down during any pandemic.

The bottom line leads to these questions:

A. If Dr. Keay thought so highly of JZ and her school’s facilities to the point of investigating the use of her property in 2006 as a Yelm-area quarantine site for county and state officials, why did he not raise concerns then about the school’s use of the “lye-mineral tonic,” the focus of his 2012 letter? Lye is commonly used in food preparations, including curing olives and baking soft pretzels. RSE’s curriculum no longer presented the “lye-mineral tonic” to students after 1999. Based on what Dr. Keay has written, he would have had hundreds of reports in the late 1990s from students purporting to have adverse effects from the “lye-mineral tonic,” yet he shared no such information until 2012. Why did he not raise his concerns with officials and RSE in 2006 if such were the case?

B. Was Dr. Keay’s opinion of RSE altered in the latter 2000s from his intimate relationship with Virginia Coverdale and her involvement as his patient and office worker?

Steve Klein

Manager, RSE Event Services

Yelm