I recently told the reporter on the education beat for the Duluth News Tribune that I thought Duluth’s former school superintendent was a “pathological liar.” It may turn up in a story she is contemplating on “the” broken promise of the Red Plan which I take is the supposedly iron clad guarantee by Dixon that the Red Plan would not entail any further tax increases that it had all been paid for by funds raised by the school district in its initial financing.
I was quite serious in using the term which unfortunately may be construed by many as hyperbole. I did not intend it as so and yet I did not provide the reporter with all the hints I have had that this may be a correct assessment. This has put a burr under my saddle to further explain or document the evidence for my assessment. Certainly long time readers of my blog, the eight of you, are well aware of this preoccupation of mine. One has only to type Dixon and liar into the blog’s search function to find copious entries that tie the two words together.
There is some irony for me on this subject for I have spent the last half year undoing the damage for having put my trust in another pathological liar a fellow named Jeff Marvin. Again there are several posts on Mr. Marvin and his business dealings. At one time I was going to write a long series of posts explaining how I ended up writing checks to the man for a hundred thousand dollars to fix a wet basement only to discover he ordered damage to the the sewage pipes to be covered up leading to a godawful mess. Frankly I was far too overwhelmed fixing the damage to write it all up. I only completed, largely, the repair work the day before Thanksgiving.
Exposing Dixon’s many duplicities has become for me, as I said, a preoccupation but it is wrapped up in a larger concern of mine – the future of the Duluth Schools post Red Plan. Long after the good superintendent’s departure the folks in charge of the Duluth Schools are caught up in the sorry task of explaining away the unanticipated consequences of the way Dr. Dixon did business. As a truth groupie I believe that full disclosure and confession would be the best way to turn our schools around. Yet, this path is not being taken for a lot of reasons but most importantly because most people find confession unpalatable. I can’t confess for other people. I don’t really know what other people are thinking. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have theories. This series will be my best speculation about the things that are currently being said to explain away the past decisions of the Red Plan. It will take a fair bit of writing and I’m not much in the mood to write about it because it feels like a chore. But I’ve gotten very good at doing my chores in recent years – like fixing the basement I unwittingly allowed to be undermined by a month’s worth of sewage.
The following posts will be a little like my recent war against tens of thousands of dung flies.
