I miss Lincolndemocrat, I really do. As I type this its exactly 2:00 AM. I have earphones on with Pandora Radio blasting into my ears at full tilt a work by Gabriel Faure. I can only faintly hear it through the ear plugs I put in after the ten O’clock news to insure a good night’s sleep. Its such a pain getting them in my tiny ear canals that I’m not taking them out so I can get some shut eye again after this early morning visit with my neglected old blog. Small ears and a big mouth. That’s me.
Anyway, once I woke up I got to thinking about tonight’s (last night’s actually) Education meeting and all the things about it worth recording on the blog I knew I would have to get up and attend to some small portion of them before I could get back to sleep. Some small portion because its still a very delicate time on our Board. Trust is an endangered species and nothing could kill it as quickly as my fingers busily typing away about my observations and posting them for all the world to see. As my Nana always said when we were playing the card game Touring on a family vacation, “BYC Harry.” “Breast your cards.”
I like all my fellow school board members. I can’t help myself. I’ve had serious, soul searching disagreements with at least two of them and yet I like them. Being on the School Board with them has given me a chance to remind myself of just why. For those curious to know which board members I’m referring to I’ll point out that if you really want to figure this out all you will have to do is type each one’s name into the search engine feature on this blog and see what I’ve said about all of them in past posts. It should only take you about five hours to read everything and if you have the dedication for the task more power to you. As for this post I’ll not offer any hints.
What a meeting we had. The Committee Chairman Annie Harala called it to order at 4:15 and all seven of us were there before we got too far underway. I was sitting next to Judy with Rosie just past her around the corner of the table where I was sitting. Annie sat next to the “Assistant Soup” Eddie Crawford, as Supt. Gronseth called the position he too occupied only a year and a half ago. Opposite me were Miern, Art and Bill Westholm.
I have been amazed at the brevity of the School Board’s standing committees in recent years. These meetings were always a couple hours long when I served on the Board a decade and more ago. During the height of the Red Plan I’m not sure how long they lasted but they were supplemented with constant and sometimes interminable Committee of the Whole meetings. By the time Art Johnston joined Gary Glass on the Board and the Red Plan became a forgone conclusion I think the meetings got much shorter and rancorous but I’m not entirely sure. By that time I didn’t have the heart to sit through one back in the audience. Through the summer I began attending the meetings only to watch them adjourn within fifteen or twenty minutes.
With three fresh new faces (if that term can apply to me) on the Board there has been a sea change. We newcomers have lots of questions and now that Art Johnston is no longer alone with his queries all the Board members seem much freer to ask them. With last night’s agenda of serious topics we had a meeting very reminiscent of the ones from my era. It went on for three hours and fifteen minutes. I loved it even though I had to excuse myself a couple times to call Claudia and warn her I wouldn’t be getting home early for dinner. I’d told her I thought I’d be home between six and seven and that was to be after having a cup of coffee with Annie Harala after the Ed meeting that we had supposed would take an hour or so. We probably should have known better. The night before I didn’t get home from the HR and Business Committees until 6:30 after two hours and fifteen minutes.
The topics were not presented in the order of the agenda and the first of any length was about our efforts to builds an On-line school. It was an interesting subject but had it been placed at the end of the agenda rather than toward the front would probably not have been given the half hour we spent on it. I plan on taking up the invitation that was offered school board members to pay the project and its teachers a call soon. In fact, on Friday, I will be volunteering at Lifehouse where a number of our prospective On-line students hang out after school.
A more sobering presentation was made on our District’s attempts to reign in out of school suspensions. Last year we handed down 1440 days of OSS. Even before the meeting I had marked up the two page outline of the plan with dozen’s of questions. I was not able to ask many of them as other school board members dug into the discussion with questions of their own. That number did sound astonishing to me. It was better than one day of out of school suspension for every seven of our students. That statistic alone suggests that I spend a few thousand words writing about it on this post. Not gonna happen. I’ll just mention the two questions I asked of particular note.
Directly opposite me at the meeting was Bill Westholm a former long time principal at Denfeld and also a long time Assistant Soup. I asked Bill if he could give me any ballpark figures from his era of how often out of school suspensions were handed down. He hadn’t expected the question with its pregnant potential for an unfavorable comparison. I hadn’t made it clear whether I was asking about OSS stats just at Denfeld or for the entire school system. He qualified at bit how OSS had changed so comparisons weren’t very clear so I put my question more succinctly, “1400?”
That brought a quick response. “Oh no, one or two hundred.”
Tonya Sconiers, Denfeld’s current principal entered the Committee meeting shortly after I asked the question unaware of the previous discussion. She was busy at the school with one group of students and about to fly away again for some other Denfeld event. I asked her a follow up which threw her off as well. I told her that I had heard wonderful things about how she was dealing with some of these issues. (That was true. Jana Hollingsworth the DNT’s Education reporter had told me Ms. Sconiers was doing some innovative things at Denfeld) and I asked her if she could ask anything of our school board to help fulfill her dreams of fixing things what would she ask for. At a very fast pace she began laying out something like a framework of the things that had been done and that were being planned at Denfeld to deal with these issues. It was like she was going through mental filing cabinets looking through folders instead of reaching for the stars. When she concluded she looked at me and honestly said that as a little girl she didn’t dream much. (I took that to mean that when she saw a problem she simply charged ahead and dealt with it which is very like her personality today) She told me she would go home and do some dreaming and get back to me. I found that a very satisfying answer even if it left me hanging as to how we would address this calamity.
By now we were two hours into our meeting and it was time for a new group of folks to make a presentation. The dozen or so advocates for an Ojibwe language Immersion class in the Duluth Schools came forward after their long and patient wait. Once again I will only scratch the surface of our discussion with my small part in it. I gave a short, I hope, peroration just before asking a question in which I said that I was very sympathetic to the class because I was well aware of how the world was losing a rich legacy of some of the tens of thousand languages once spoken. I’m not sure what words to type into the search function to find this but I’m sure I’ve written about this issue on the blog at some length before. To my surprise the Superintendent spoke up after this to suggest if the Board wished he could move this topic from an “information” item to an “action” item.
When one of the Board members grew a little alarmed at the prospect of another expense on our impoverished budget Mr. Gronseth explained that it would be modest to place such a program in our schools because it would be like adding seventeen new students which was almost a full elementary classroom and thus actually increase our enrollment. At this one young mother from the audience spoke up and told us near tears that this program to save the culture was so profoundly important that she drove her child to Duluth every day to take part in it. Its hard to argue with tears. I told the Super that it appeared to me that the Board had perhaps surprised him by showing such support and told him I wouldn’t mind this becoming an action item although I was sure there was more negotiating to do to set it into motion.
By this time Judy was champing at the bit. She had an activity scheduled at East High and she was about to miss it. But there was no stopping our meeting the superintendent had one more huge item of particular concern. He had been working with his staff to completely change the organizational chart of the District’s administration. Here I’ll add my two cents. For the past five years it has been new construction that has driven our district. Its not surprising that we took our eye off the day to day running of operations ball. What’s more one of the formerly critical divisions of the District from my day, the Curriculum Department, had been gutted I presume for budgetary reasons. It was down to three people. After reviewing the charts I piped up to explain that from where I stood he was in charge of his administration and I would trust him to figure out how to make it function smoothly.
Our meeting eventually came to an end long after Judy Seliga-Punyko’s East plans could be met. As we were putting on our coats Annie hurried over to ask if we couldn’t postpone our meeting. It had already been postponed once before but it was late and I readily agreed. Perhaps we will get together Friday for coffee. At some point I said something about our meeting being a three hour tour and Judy picked up on that and began reciting the verse from the old Gilligan’s Island theme song. I couldn’t help myself but try to remember the passage and sing it out. Everyone my age knew it by heart in the 1960’s.
One last anecdote which I found very humorous and I hope doesn’t twist anyone’s knickers. I plan on jollying up my sometimes contentious Board colleagues and will tease them mercilessly, if gently, as time goes on. During our meeting Rosie Judy and I had a short conference over something I’ve long forgotten when Rosie answered a question I tossed to her by saying, “Art…uh Harry…..” I piped up and asked, “Rosie, was that a Freudian slip?” Flustered Rosie explained, “Well Art’s been on my mind a lot lately.” Judy and I both guffawed at that. BTW, I’ve been teasing Art a lot lately too. Kumbayah here I come.
I’ve got a Men’s Breakfast at Church in a couple hours. I’m going to see if I can catch a few more zzzz’s. Good Morning.
