An email today requesting that the School Board honor an old promise and my reply following it:
Dear School Administration, Board and Duluth Police Department,
You promised when you built the new East High School in a residential area that lunch would be closed campus. The current open campus has cost the residents of East High money in property value loss due to traffic, kids (not all are students at East) hanging out around our homes, litter, noise and less security for our homes. East is not like Denfield , where Denfield is in a commercial area.
I live at **************************. There is no parking restriction **************************, despite it having access to 6 residential homes that currently 8 children live in while the street *************************. The students and their friends are not going to the park, but hanging out in their cars, drinking and doing things that when I come by their car and look at them and their car license plates, they leave quickly. Are these children safe? Are we as residents safe?
You may say it is such a small representation of East students, but it can take only one to create an unsafe situation. Our ********** street with 3 cars of students a day is significant. This has created problems driving to and from our home. It also attracts people who are not students to be with them.
Keep our school and our neighborhood safe. There will always be budget issues for the school, but there is also a financial and safety cost to the tax paying residents of this area. I attended a modified closed campus high school in [another city] which seniors who were good students and needed to go to work obtained a leave campus permit (I was one of them).
Please reconsider,
To which I replied:
Dear ************,
Thank you for writing and sharing your concerns. I’m afraid that this will not be the reply were hoping for.
The neighbors at all our high schools and sometimes our middle schools have the occasional dust ups with kids. Officer Tusken outlined them for the School Board and the term “dust up” doesn’t do justice to some of the incidents he has described.
When I served on the school board ten and more years ago there were the same issues. At the time I opposed a closed campus at the high schools for a number of reasons including my belief that bottling up kids at that age is counterproductive. Children should be learning about freedom and how to use it wisely. Some smoked in neighbor’s yards and the neighbors weren’t happy about it. We had what we called the Red line at East High that our kids weren’t to cross but cross it they did.
Closing a campus requires our school employees to be part of a police action that they strongly resist. Perhaps we should impose this on them but I can’t bring myself to do so. I think a concerted effort to “educate” our children to be considerate of their neighbors is a wiser if not foolproof alternative. It has improved things in the past.
You believe you were promised by a previous school board that the campus would be closed. If that School Board made such a promise it could not promise that the Board’s composition would remain the same in coming years. That has come to pass. This is a different Board which is unwilling to do what the previous Board was itself unwilling to do. Since I was not part of the earlier Board and since I would have objected to closed campuses I feel no obligation to honor a promise I had nothing to do with.
We can lamely absolve ourselves by claiming poverty since it would cost a quarter million dollars we don’t have to institute a closed campus but let me be frank. School Boards will always plead poverty to get out of doing something they don’t want to do.
You may know that I personally strongly objected to putting a high school at the Ordean site. Future conflicts with neighbors, like those you’ve witnessed, was one of my concerns. Predictably my fears have been borne out. To the extent that I am responsible for the ongoing problems you suffer let me express my sympathy however unsatisfactory that is.
Please know that I will be quick to work with East High and its students and staff and the police to improve community relations. I would welcome any suggestions you have and I will forward them to the principal of East High for her consideration. Please do not hesitate to contact me about any future difficulties you have with your East High neighbors.
Sincerely,
Harry Welty
