One of my regular email pals sent me an email this morning that helped me decide what today’s post would be about. This, by the way, is not my regular “Buddy.”
Have you heard Mary Lambert’s song Secrets?
You both could use the chorus from this song as campaign slogans.
Makes me think of unrealistic family dynamics that promote an air of the perfect family with perfect children doing perfect things with their perfect pets with having perfect teeth…Â Until you peek behind their closed door to see the alcohol infused blackmail shame based punishments that scar people for life.
I’m scarred.
I’m over it…. I don’t care if the world knows what my secrets are.
Everyone, hum a few bars with me!
I’ve never heard of Lambert or her song. I linked to the youtube in the email post and watched it before replying to my corespondent. Its a catchy song.
I’ll hazard a guess as to why I got this otherwise cryptic message. I suspect it has a lot to do with today’s News Tribune story highlighting the notable and excellent news of Laura Mac’s comeback from the academic dead.
ISD 709’s leaders would like the public to think everything is on the mend when in fact there are secrets behind the superficial success. That, at least, is what I think the email suggests and that is certainly the theme for the Lambert song.
Lambert’s complaints about secrets is nothing new. Its why psychiatry was invented and before that the memoir and before that the confessional. My Dad, who was pretty much an anti-Papist (with two Catholic children in law ha, ha, ha, ha) always told me that one feature of the Catholic church that he thought was very useful was the confessional. What he meant was that it gave people a place to confront their own secrets honestly. Of course, after the last decade of news stories I can’t help but wonder how many sexual predator priests confessed their sacrosanct sins of predation to their priestly confessors. There is nothing “so what” about the answer to that question. Did a couple Hail Mary’s absolve them from their secrets?
My blog is a first glimpse of my modest secrets that I put on the examining table for a thorough review. At the moment I’m not digging into them because they would be a distraction from the terrible secrets that our school district has so much trouble hiding i.e. learning gap, overcrowded classes, Red Plan paranoia. In my view they should be faced up to, not swept under the carpet. Unless we face them I certainly won’t shut up about them and we will never be able to “move forward.” Unless I oblige with a heart attack or removed by the School Board Duluth is stuck with me for three more years.
Here’s my quick take on the good news at Laura Mac with a huge dollop of industrial waste poured on top for good measure.
To make the miracle at Laura Mac we got a million plus from the state. We have four or five other schools that could use that money to get themselves out of their holes. Will the state pony up more for these other schools and their students to the tune of a million each?
As unlikely as this would be we once had that kind of money for our schools and it came from our local levy. In 1997 when I was on the Board we levied close to $23 million for our schools. Today its about $24.5 million. So what’s the big deal? Well in 1997 almost $18 million of our levy went into the General Fund for operations/classrooms. In 2014 only $13 million goes into the General Fund. That’s five million less. (in June I had it calculated at ten million less) That’s five million that could address some of the impoverished classroom spending that our other schools could use to get out from behind the eight ball.
Where is that money going today? Well in 1997 we used $2 million of the local levy to pay off old bonds for past school building. In 2014 we are using it to cover $14.5 million in bond repayments…..largely for Red Plan building.
Our School Board paved the way in the September to make a dent in this shortfall. They voted to raise another $600,000 for next year’s levy by pre-approving a “levy to the max.” OK, let’s subtract $600,000 from the five million of once available general fund levies that now go to Red Plan debt service…..Does anyone see a shortfall there?
Will we get that one million per troubled building from the State of Minnesota……Not even if Mark Dayton is reelected and he gets an all-DFL legislature. For crying out loud they legislature just authorized spending $14.3 million annually to bail out the Duluth Teachers Retirement Fund for years into the future. That was the best and most unremarked upon news event for Duluth this year. It may have been the best news of the decade!
Where does that leave our schools operational funding?
What is the solution?
How about cobbling up a nonsense set of allegations against the school board member whose many questions about the Red Plan continue to go unanswered? Why yes, that’s it! That’s the solution to spending all our general fund money on the Red Plan. If we use the world’s most aggressive, brown nosing, liar to bolster the allegations against him……all the better. And we’ll top it off with a bill for legal services that could add up to the cost of a teacher!
Man. I didn’t mean to go all negative on you my poor readers. I planned on writing some suggestions to my fellow board members about how to make me less of a pain in the butt. I guess I’d start by suggesting that they listen to that song by Mary Lambert linked to above and pay heed to it. The alternative is to keep letting our pedophile priests hide their secrets in the confessional. Fat lot of good that will do our children……the ones not suffocating at the bottom of our colossal, new, state-of-the-art, swimming pools because we don’t have enough money to hire enough staff to keep them as safe as the shareholders of Johnson Controls.
Oh, yeah, and if you had coffee with me to talk things over I might not feel compelled to write stuff like this in my blog. At breakfast today someone called over to offer me condolences for the trials I’m enduring at School Board meetings. They had just read Loren Martell’s description of the last meeting. My wife looked at me and said “you are part of the problem” or words to that affect. I would expect her to say such a thing. She’s studying for a divinity degree.
I called back, “Claudia says the rest of the School Board has to endure me too!”
