January 3, 2014
Dear Friends,
With our passage into 2014 it has been forty years since I moved to Duluth to become a public school teacher. Since then I have never found myself far from our public schools. Education is far more to me than that slogan carved into the new East high school, “the foundation of the state.” To me it’s what thinking beings pursue to understand the universe.
In my long recent fight against the theft of the public’s say in how we finance our schools I came perilously close to an estrangement with our schools. Now that I have been elected to the School Board I once fought so bitterly It’s time to rededicate myself to public education and to “pluck up that which [has been] planted.”
I am a son of the Baby Boom and popular music has been the soundtrack for my life from Presley’s Hound Dog to the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. One Boomer song has been on my mind for the last month. It’s the Byrds Turn Turn Turn with its lyrics plucked from the third chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes:
A Time for Everything
1 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
2 a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
3 a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4 a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5 a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6 a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7 a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak…
A new season has begun and this is a long overdue thank you for the season past and your help putting me back on the school board. Sending out this letter has weighed on my conscience since the election. Mailing it out today completes my campaign. I am grateful to 300 folks who let me put up lawnsigns, several thousand who took the time to speak with me on their front porches and the seven thousand who voted for me. I couldn’t have won without any of these people but you were an even more critical part of my success. You were among the few, the one hundred, who sent me donations that helped carry the day. Without your generosity I would not have been given this chance to end my unhappy estrangement.
I will be just one of seven school board members trying the put the worst of the past behind us while doing my best to make good use of the rich resources this community has placed at the disposal of our schools. I will do this for the sake of our children. Again, thank you.
Harry Welty
Duluth School Board member elect, at large
