live wire

I was going to title this with the cliche about being up to the wire then thought of a better cliche. The District’s hopes for passage of anything will look a bit like that poor fellow in the Green Mile who gets smoked in the electric chair. I just saw the Art and Gary show on Almanac North and then on Fox News. That two Board members are so diligently undermining the levy campaign suggests to me that if the lowest level offered gets 30% approval it will be a miracle.

I will vote for the levy yes, yes, yes despite dis-ingenuousness on the part of the School District. In fact, Art’s argument has made me think long and hard about claims I’ve made in the past. Art is definitely right. We haven’t cut $24 million over the past several years. We’ve moved our spending from one part of operations budget to another. In fact, as I said before considering we’ve still got about the same budget as we had five years ago with 2,000 fewer students you could argue that per pupil spending has soared.

I suspect school districts all across Minnesota make the same argument and most board members just go along without thinking much about it. Art and Gary, however, have endured two and four years respectively of being lied to and frozen out of the loop. Dixon may be gone but his henchmen all remain to carry on. I don’t blame the Board dissidents for their hair trigger suspicions about the District’s advertising campaign even though I have no doubt the consequences of a levy failure will be terrible.

Frank Wanner who was one of Dixon’s top enablers and deifiers, had a lot of gall complaining about them at the special meeting tonight. He just won 2% in unaffordable benefit increases for his teachers which was the Judas money Dixon paid him for not rocking the boat. Now Frank’s teachers have impossible class sizes. Frank should stand in front of a mirror before he gives his next tongue lashing. Rep. Garofalo may deserve it. Art and Gary don’t.

So to end this post let me ask the question that I don’t expect Bill Hanson to give me the answer to:

When the Board spent a ton of money to pay for all-day kindergarten did Bill count the program cuts he made to pay for Kindergarten as part of the $24 million in cuts the District is whining now about?

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