No more heart attacks

I’ve had very few moments of anxiety since 1. I decided not to fret about the abyss the School Board was about to jump into so blindly and 2. found out from the Doctors that my heart is healthy.

I’m not reconciled to the District’s state of affairs but I’m back in the mode I was put into six years ago when JCI and the Red Planners worked overtime to keep me off the Board. That mode is a patient biding of my time. I couldn’t get elected until the Red Plan proved a disaster. In three or four years with escalating class sizes I hope to be in a position to persuade our teachers that they really would prefer to be able to teach than be paid handsomely to babysit a madhouse.

By the way the teachers weren’t asked before the contract negotiations whether they would prefer smaller classes or more money. The union leadership decided for them that it would be more money. It will be interesting to see how many elementary teachers will be asked to teach split classes next year (two grades in a class). Their reward for this sacrifice? $500 big ones. Whoopi ding!

I indicated in my post this morning that the floodgates are about to open but not quite yet. My daughter is getting married in three weeks and she asked me to make some fun things for her wedding. Until today I couldn’t set time aside in my mind to work on them. I got started today. Among other things she wants me to make a small topper for her wedding cupcakes – the car from the board game Life. I’ve been thinking about how to go about this for two months now. The school district, my blog, my fix up of the attic, can all wait. I also want to continue my foray into the 19th century reading about its politics. After my book on Speaker of the House Reed I think I’ll open the Pulitzer Prize winner by Meacham about Andy Jackson.

Not that the District is going away. I spent the day of the contract vote clipping a month’s worth of newspapers and filing them into folders by month and year. While Claudia is away tonight (at the seminary) I may begin rereading the School District articles starting back in the late 1980’s when I began collecting them. I know that there are a lot of folks who tell me we shouldn’t look back and obsess about the the past. The Red Plan is over after all. Trouble is, you can’t stop people from looking back. For instance, a lot of the Red Plan supporters never got over a failed building bond referendum in the mid 1990’s and were thrilled to get payback on the old codgers they blamed for defeating it. Thrilled all the way to 50 kids in a classroom.

There have been a spate of testy emails in the School Board email about whether we should televise meetings other than the one official school board meeting we hold each month. I closed the emails before reading them through. Sheesh! I’ll probably oppose televising them generally due to our fiscally straightened circumstances but there should be exceptions. Last Tuesday’s meeting was the most important meeting we are likely to hold for the four years I’ll be on this Board. We dug set our course and the public really should have been able to witness it. It should have been televised.

In fact, an old Red Plan critic did film it to play back on Duluth’s PAC channel. I asked her to make a copy for me so that I could upload it to Youtube. It’ll be up in a couple of days. I can’t guarantee the sound quality or production values but I’ll let my Readers know when its up.

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