Let’s get real #1 – Has that ship sailed?

This is a sort of a morning-after-the-crisis post. It will be the first of several more posts to come examining the recent nonsense manufactured by people with hidden agendas or smothered in cluelessness.

All of these posts will have at their heart (my heart) the question above: Has the DPSA ship truly sailed off to Snowflake?

The answer is Probably. I resent how quickly our school board and the Edison critics smashed their bottles of champagne on its hull. The hasty decision denied our community the three or four weeks available to think this important issue through. Instead, the insiders of ISD 709 rushed to kill the project, albeit with a brief episode of transparancy, to push the Central offer’s head back in the Jack-in-the-box.

My proposal that we enter negotiations Thursday night was meant to keep everybody’s options open. The four Board members who voted to prevent negotiations had their minds made up in advance to shut down any further discussion. I’d like to bring the subject up again and state law gives three board members the right to call a meeting. I just don’t know if the DPSA Board could stand any more public brow beating. It would be much simpler for them to quietly build their new high school at Snowflake and be done with ISD 709. I view that as a lost opportunity for Duluth to ends its public schools civil wars.

Furthermore, we not only have turned down a shot in the arm that would have served us well for several years we, the ISD 709 School Board are taking a great gamble. We need to find a buyer in the next year. If we don’t find one I will personally remind voters in the 2018 election who killed the goose who offered us a golden egg and allowed us to sink deep into a financial black hole.

First I need to make one things clear. Today’s Duluth School Board is fantastic compared to the one recently retired.

I called Chair Harala this week and asked her to meet with me. This was something that was no longer possible in the last year of the old school board. Annie agreed as I expected she would. Annie is the first Chair since before the Keith Dixon Era to pay the slightest attention to fairness in Board discussions. Annie and I had a good discussion although not without some tension. We bit our lips and stuck to business. She told me I had a good heart and I probably assured her that she did too. I left assured that we would have an open discussion that evening. Annie more than made good on her promise to keep it open.

Annie let me know that such discussions would end if I shot my mouth (or blog) off about them. I don’t blame her. I will push that button a little by noting she thought I was guilty of “ageism.”

I don’t deny it exactly but I would put it another way. I am guilty of experiencism. I do think my experience counts for something although I hope I’m not too condescending about it. If its true that we learn from our mistakes I must be one of the smartest people in Minnesota.

I have more experience with ISD 709 than the rest of our Board. Alanna Oswald, David Kirby and Nora Sandstad have to serve nine more months before they have a single year’s worth of experience on our Board. Annie and Rosie Loeffler-Kemp have 4 combined years on our school board. Art Johnston has served 6 years. I have served ten years so that its my ten years to the rest of the Board’s ten years. It goes deeper than that. David, Nora, Alanna and I have teaching degrees. Alanna has a masters degree to my bachelor’s Degree but she was my student when she was in “Junior High.” I first began running for the School Board when Annie was a second grader in my son’s class. David Kirby has a PhD in Education and, as he told me, “taught principals how to be principals.” But he has not been an Educator since he became a family practice doctor. He arrived in Duluth twenty years ago to my 42 years in the city. I was voting to allow the Edison schools to set up shop back then before his children were born let alone enrolled in Duluth’s schools. Nora Sandstad also left teaching to earn a law degree.

As for knowing Duluth I’ve got by far the longest residency. I began knocking on doors when I ran for public office in 1976. There is not a part of town or the school district I haven’t door knocked many times. Furthermore, if anyone wants to access ISD 709’s history they have the public library’s online newspaper database and my blog, slanted though it may be.

I will freely admit to suffering from “experiencism” and maybe even being insufferable in the process. I hope, however, that most visitors to my blog have concluded that my main purpose in writing it is to keep the dealings of the Duluth Schools transparent and understandable.

Now on to Representative Simonson’s efforts to clip the wings of the Duluth Public School Academy.

About the author