I’ll get you my pretty – and your little dog too!
If the 3,000 people each month who visit this blog (on average three times a month) are any indication folks are curious about what goes on in the Duluth Schools. The more often I post the more people read. Yesterday when I posted the “unedited political reverie” 449 dropped by. I presume that because the vast majority of my posts are about the sausage making that is the Duluth School Board my visitors are interested in my take on the goings-on although many of them, like my friend Karl Schuettler, may read me with “a grain of salt.”
Would our schools over-crowding and under funding, or the back biting in the Boardroom or posturing in the Court room or the education of our children be improved if I stopped my commentary? That’s a legitimate question. Do the people who read what I write feel guilty for reading what I write? While I feel liberated for getting things off my chest do my readers feel guilty for paying attention to me? Darned if I know.
What I do know is that I’m like a cat. I want to know what’s behind every locked door. Or maybe I’m like a dog, specifically, Dorothy’s Toto. That’s because many of my colleagues on the Board remind me, not of the wicked witch but of the Wizard of Oz and his famous line, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” Like Toto I have pulled the curtain back on our School Board.
I did it when the Administration illegally prevented me from being admitted to a contract negotiations session. I did it when I explained how the Board refused to make public how $84 million of Red Plan money was spent. I did it when I pointed out that our attorney advised us that trying to remove Art Johnston could be prohibitively expensive and ugly. Heck, I got censured for sharing that information with the Tribune and the Tribune’s editors took the School Board’s side! I keep pointing out that a member of the Board is routinely denied public information even when he goes to the extreme of making official public data requests according to Minnesota laws that guarantee all Minnesotan’s the right to see public data.
Perhaps my greatest sin is to have stuck up for Art Johnston when our Board threw phony charges of assault, racism and conflict of interest at him while pointing out the fallacy of the threadbare allegations. The Tribune’s response was to beg Art to step off the Board. They were running out of money to pay for all the ink they spilled.
I don’t know who will win the upcoming election or how the new board will act. I will completely bow to the wishes of the voters of Duluth for whom this board has shown great disregard by denying them a say on the Red Plan, attempting to overturn the 2013 election of Art Johnston and, most recently, by attempting to terminate this year’s election in order to afford some candidates a free fifth year to their four year terms without facing the voters. Granted, only two board members pushed hard for this last proposal, Clerk Rosie Loeffler-Kemp and Chair Judy Seliga-Punyko the only Board members who are allowed to meet with the Administration to secretly plot strategy. Fortunately, the sensible majority of the Board recognized that this electoral change was a bridge too far.
I post what I do in the conviction that knowledge is power and that ignorance is vulnerability not bliss. I may be wrong in what I report. Goodness knows. I have been kept on one side of the Wizard’s curtain for two years so I am prone to speculate.
I am, however, bolder about my reporting than I was in my first visit to Oz as a board member from 1995 through 2003. The high and mighty nature of this board invites tough scrutiny. There are very few things I am unwilling to report or comment on. Mine is a kind of extreme transparency which I think is invited by the Duluth News Tribune’s inclination to accommodate the powers-that-be. Frankly, if the Board was more transparent no one would visit my blog because I would have little to report. My popularity or unpopularity reflects a real hunger by the public for some insight on our decision making.
I’m still out of town but I’m monitoring things in Duluth from afar. I wish I could say that things are getting saner. They are not. I will have much to write about when I return. In the meantime, I will post one more item that I think my readers will find revealing (transparent). It’s an email I sent to one of Alanna Oswald’s supporters. I also sent it, with permission, to the Tribune’s editorial page editor. In a few minutes I will send it to my readers.
