I had a very nice lunch with the Superintendent yesterday. Afterward he prompted me with a question to get me past pleasantries to the meat of a discussion he knew I wanted to have with him. He mentioned that our PR person had stepped into his office to ask him if he was about to have lunch with me because she’d just read it on my blog.
Imagine dealing with someone like me who seems to have no filter but who shouts to the world what is going on and then repeats everything you tell him or her even or especially if they are embarrassing. I may be one of the few people in this world not to shrink from such encounters. I’ve become an accomplished, even prolific blogger. I have time to write and when someone criticizes me I have this space to offer my own version of events. That is a luxury a busy person like a school superintendent doesn’t have.
After our lunch I invited the Superintendent to drive over to my house so I could show him my plush new digs and to give him a sense where I will be operating this summer as I try to wrest the School Board out of the hands of the folks who so badly want to enforce a kind of harmony based on brutal suppression of information. I didn’t tell that to Mr. Gronseth but Katie Kaufman can read this and tell him.
Our conversation in my attic office was serious-minded. I think I promised not to reveal what we talked about. I’ve made similar promises to past chair Mike Miernicki. A politician’s stock and trade is talking to folks but a writer, like me, risks betraying trusts left and right when he/she reports what the conversations were about. The light of day is a great impediment to candor.
At some point I reminded the Superintendent about Plato’s metaphor about the shadows on the wall. (This Wikipedia page calls it an allegory) I never did read Plato’s Republic in my high school humanities class but I paid close attention to Mr. Wiltgen’s lecture on the subject. As I recall, without reading the page I just linked to, Plato describes much of life as being like the indefinite shapes cast by a fire in a cave on its rough walls by figures that can’t be seen beyond the fire. I told the Superintendent that this is how I’ve felt for the past year and a half on the School Board trying to make sense of its actions. I have no clue what the other school board members are doing behind closed walls. This includes the Federal Case Art Johnston has brought against the School Board to prevent them from removing him. There is a short window, perhaps a week, where cooler heads can prevail and we can come to some sort of settlement.
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Just because I can’t see much of what is going on behind the Superintendent’s office (the fire) doesn’t mean I won’t work very hard to try to discern what has taken place there where I’m not welcome. What I can see is the behavior of people when I am around them at Committee meetings or on the news when they comment about events in the Board room. I was once behind those walls and have a good sense of what takes place there.
For example in a recent conversation a friend suggested that in his Prior Lake interview Superintendent Gronseth had been set up as a straw man to make the preferred candidate who got the job look good. I admitted I didn’t know if the interview had played out that way but said in my experience school board members wanted to have the best choices to make a selection from. It made little sense to me for the Prior Lake School Board to select an obvious loser to make the winner look really good. That could backfire badly. What if, as sometimes happens, your preferred candidate backed out. Then you would be stuck with a loser you put in the selection process. People do act in seemingly irrational ways (just look at our school board’s legal squabbles) but they do behave in generally predictable ways. Handcuff and humiliate Loren Martell and you create an implacable foe.
I never tire of pointing out that I’ve been the victim of three attempts at character assassination one of which helped Judy Seliga-Punyko defeat me in an election that prevented me from helping craft a more moderate, compromise Red Plan. That was eight years ago. Like Loren and Art Johnston I’ve been keeping meticulous records. I didn’t get around to showing the Superintendent my office storage room with row upon row of files and documents that go back forty and more years. My news clipping file on the District goes back to 1989. These files include tons of paperwork that document our District’s continuing shrinkage and suffering following the Red Plan.
The Superintendent sees himself as a victim of circumstance who’s advice to the current majority falls on deaf ears. Our war is not his. He’s here to keep the District running and shielded from our war. For me that is not a very satisfying explanation. I told the Superintendent I found his vague explanations of what happens beyond the fire hard to credit. Oh, I see the hard-hearted way the majority is proceeding but until I become a fly on the wall I’ll keep having to use my imagination and experience to interpret events.
If what he says is true its ironic that the board majority in its attempts to avenge his shove are making life infinitely harder with this legal distraction that sucks all the oxygen out of the Superintendent’s room.
