NOTE: THIS POST CONTAINS THE CLAIM THAT THE STOWE SCHOOL PLAYGROUND IS NOT YET DONE. THAT IS NOT TRUE. SO MUCH FOR IMPECCABLE SOURCES.
Last night at the School Board meeting the majority balked at authorizing a $12,000 “change order” for the company supervising our change of mulch. The justification was that the playgrounds were configured differently than the supervisors thought necessitating more work. This footnote missed the DNT today.
I was very pleased when Nora Sandstad suggested tabling the decision for another month. Nora joined Art, Alanna and me with some other more reluctant board members to push for a switch out of the rubber tire mulch. As the mother of young kids she has no doubt kept in touch with parents who have watched the project take place over the summer. The target date for completion is October 15th but starting the school year without playgrounds has been tough on kids and schools. Even the Stowe Playground out west is not finished and it wasn’t even part of the original mulch switch we authorized last June.
There are whisperings across the District of foot dragging and I’d prefer to wait until next month to make a decision. From the beginning I was concerned at the million dollar cost of the program and the idea of getting nickle and dimed at the end is annoying. Nora’s motion echoed the concerns expressed by school board candidate, Dana Krivogrorsky, who spoke 22 minutes into the the Board meeting and asked us not to approve the change order.
I read a hot email to the District from a parent at Homecroft who scolded the District because the children there are playing on a parking lot. Balls were being spit out at traffic along the Howard Gnesen Road. That required parents to volunteer for a couple hours a day to be part of a “human fence” and retrieve lost balls for the kids so that they didn’t rush out into the traffic. I will be standing watch there next week myself. The email did prompt the District to bring some temporary fencing to set up by the road.
The discussion of the change order included a guarantee that refusing to pay it or paying it later would not in any way push the completion of the work past October 15th. Even so, the Administration made a very strong plea to accept the additional expense without delay that I couldn’t buy. I expect a couple more shoes to fall before this project is over. I hope they are soft fuzzy slippers and not heavy construction boots.
This view also was addressed at the beginning of the Board meeting by yet another candidate for the Duluth School Board, Kurt Kuehn, who asked that the District pay more attention to transparency by making our policy on public data easy to find since he saw no evidence of its existance in a prolonged search of our offices and website. I wish him luck. Poor old Art Johnston was rebuffed for eight years by our administration in his requests for data whenever it concerned the Red Plan. It earned him an attempted ouster, $75,000 in legal fees, and a censure that the Duluth News Tribune spent a year and a half harping on. Talk about “ugly.”
Its too bad the Trib can’t always tell the difference between innocence and guilt. Maybe their editors should read the Duluth School Boards 11 Rules of Civility. Start video at 9:32:
