Floodgate nuggets, 1. Thank you DNT

I’ve got an hour before Church and no time to fully open the floodgate of posts pent up inside my poor bursting head. Fortunately there is nothing like a “Duh” editorial in the Trib to make my typing fingers itchy. Let the flood begin in little waaaay to short bursts. They’d be longer but I’ve got got a daughter getting married in a week and my mind is preoccupied.

The “Duh.”:

That’s not the way it was supposed to be, with haves and have-nots, east vs. west, Denfeld pitted against East. The Duluth school district’s Red Plan, with its controversial closing of Central High School, was supposed to result in equal offerings and opportunities at both the remaining schools. There was supposed to be balance in student enrollment and balance in demographics, including family income.

But is this balanced? More than 57 percent of students at Denfeld come from families poor enough to qualify for free or

reduced-price lunches. The percentage at East is just 21.7 percent.

Or this? While Denfeld has about 1,100 students, East has about 1,600. That means more money for East for offerings like Spanish 5 as money is distributed on a per-student basis.

What the F*** are we supposed to do DNT?

A. Yeah, we could ruthlessly enforce a new 50/50 boundary. That’d be fun.

B. We can wait until Edison builds a new high school. (perish the thought that we would sell Central) Four years later 500 happy Edison children will be in our new charter High School. If its students were all subtracted from East then we’d have a Denfeld at 1000 students and and East at 1100 students. Uneven population solved!

C. We could only enforce the closed lunch at East and give kids who don’t want to be imprisoned in a pre-college castle an incentive to transfer to Denfeld.

D. We can retract our approval of a teacher’s contract that will add another million or so bucks into bankruptcy in the next couple of years making what Supt. Gronseth called a “worse case scenario” even worse when we face a 15 million deficit instead of a mere $13.7 million deficit. Oops. Too late to do that. Worse Case scenario coming up.

I could keep going offering ideas but no time…..next nugget coming up.

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