The effect of tonight’s public forum was a tie. I don’t think it will change the minds of Board members. I took copious notes from each speaker and had a friend shoot a video of the meeting. A series of union leaders wishing to set the initial tone of the meeting got 6 of the first seven speaking spots urged the Board not to sell Central to Edison. Even so my count excluding two or three hard to decipher pleas gave the Do sells a slight advantage of 31 over 23 don’t sells.
I know the pros and cons as well as anyone living and would say that the better prepared don’t sells had a harder time getting their facts straight. They also were far more consumed by fear while the do sells were more hopeful but prepared to be disappointed. It was a good night for the cause of civility. Instead of wrath, towards the end, which at three hours was a long time coming several speakers broke up the crowd. One fellow said he took a walk by Central and he kept asking it if it wanted its walls torn down and the building said No. He gave a litany of building appurtenances like windows and doors and none of them wanted to be torn down. The audience was charmed even those who would prefer the building torn down than in the hands of Edison.
How representative this audience was I don’t know. As of just before the meeting Alanna Oswald counted only 18 Don’t sell emails to 151 Do sell emails. Of the 23 do sell speakers I counted tonight one mathematician told me that 17 of them were either ISD 709 staff or former school board members. I served with the three Board members who retired in January and all of them spoke against the sale tonight but not, in my opinion, very persuasively.
Its hard to show how collecting $14 million will hurt when the school you dread will be built anyway whether you collect the money or not. Judy Seliga-Punyko did her best to harp on the element of surprise in the announcement to suggest a Snowflake school wouldn’t be permitted. That wasn’t the worst of her fairly articulate argument. She suggested that Edison eats $8 million of ISD 709’s Special Ed money. That’s a number our finance experts didn’t verify when I asked them about her conviction.
The teachers were convinced of a couple things. First they think that Edison will gobble up lots of students and perhaps kill our schools. But even if this fear is correct it won’t stop Edison. In fact, negotiating a cap is our best guarantee of our own self preservation. The paras are under the impression that all the paras that Edison has threatens their jobs. The real problem for ISD 709 paras is that our District prefers to hire teachers than paras.
These fears have the quality of being a self fullfiling prophecy. If we act irrationally out of fear instead of logically we will almost certainly shoot ourselves in the foot.
It was also argued that letting Edison have such a classy spot as Central would help them lure students away from ISD 709. Again this would be addressed by an enrollment cap but I think old resentments carry the day here. Lots of teachers took Edison’s arrival in Duluth as a blow to their pride. Making things worse some of Edison’s supporter made a huge deal out of competition as did some of Edison’s supporter tonight. Why should we help a competitor was a question that was asked several times as was the other side’s “no brainer.”
There was one particularly brilliant East student who while struggling to lay out his thoughts demonstrated wisdom far beyond that of most of the adults speaking in the room. I’d like to post his three minutes I liked what he said so much.
I may try to cut it out and post it tomorrow. Or maybe not.
