Loren Martell’s wrap up of the Board vs the “Lone Ranger”

Its a good summation. A sample:

The feisty little guy stands up against the big powerful establishment and kicks their butts! Is this a great country, or what?

Going into Federal Court was a brilliant legal strategy on the part of the Lone Ranger’s attorneys. Up until that point, the masked marauder had been essentially riding the rails to his ouster. Everything was stacked up in favor of his accusers. They had pulled in a biased investigator recommended by Kevin Rupp, the district’s chief attorney. Rupp was closely aligned with administration, and district administration has for years been in lockstep with the school board majority.

One of my grievances is that at no time during the last seven months have I been given any information by our Superintendent or Board related to our attorney’s work. I suppose the simple reason for this is that I gave our attorney’s reasoning for proceeding with caution on Art Johnston’s removal to the Duluth News Tribune. That was the night Mary Rice made her presentation to the School Board. To me that’s more a sign of how much the insiders have to hide than a justifiable denial of information to an elected member of the School Board. I suppose it doesn’t help that I have made constant light of Mr. Rupp’s expensive and incompetent handling of our school board’s grade-school-like squabbles.

Did I mention that the Rupp and Ratwik firms maneuvering to take over the Johnston mess reminded me of two seagulls fighting over a french fry? Well, it turned out that the Ratwik firm wasn’t able to improve on Rupp’s work. My hunch is that the whole charade was called off by the Insurance Company after their poor rep had to sit through Judge Davis’s skewering of the District’s position. The insurers probably made it clear that they had already thrown enough money down the Ratwik hole. That’s what Art’s attorneys think too.

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