New readers who have stumbled onto my blog will discover that I am not always fussy about a polished post. I’m a busy man. I did come back as promised and cleaned up my bolded comments on Nora Sandstad’s op ed piece in today’s News Tribune.
I should tell my readers that Nora Sandstad is a very bright new member of our School Board. She has pushed for transparency and she has been a delightful new colleague. Unlike Chair Harala and Rosie loeffler-Kemp I do not recollect Nora hedging about her willingness to sell Central to Edison when she ran for the School Board last fall. David Kirby was quite honest as a candidate expressing his disapproval of Charter Schools so I can’t fault him for his opposition to the sale. But our Board Chair and Clerk gave no indication that they would so strongly oppose selling the Central property to a Charter School.
As a member of the Independent School District 709 Duluth Public School Board, I voted on March 31 not to sell the Central High School site so it could be used as a new charter high school. I made this decision after gathering a lot of information, considering the perspectives of hundreds of concerned citizens, and evaluating whether such a sale would be in the best interest of the ISD 709 community.
Nora is quite right to vote in the best interests of ISD 709. This was, however, is not a vote in the best interest of ISD 709.
For two important reasons, this particular sale was not in the best interest of our Duluth public schools. First, the predictable long-term financial losses significantly outweighed the one-time financial gain. Second, given that long-term financial loss, this sale seriously would have damaged our ability to provide an excellent public education to all of our students.
As treasurer of the School Board, I felt a special obligation to look at the black-and-white financial implications of this proposal. On the plus side, there was potential for $14 million of revenue. To put that in perspective, here is a hypothetical: If we dedicated this one-time revenue to add a seventh period to the secondary level school day at a cost of about $2.5 million per year, our students would have seen five years of this enhancement before the funds ran out. Unfortunately, that amount would not have permitted us to sustain any major changes for the long term; nor would it have allowed us to close the existing deficit on top of making any significant programming changes.
First, Nora, three months treasurer of the School Board, shares the same obligation for the financial implications of our decisions as all the other Board members. I’ll offer a different hypothetical. $14.2 million dollars would pay for 157 teachers at $90,000 for each ones salary and benefits. Hypothetically we could hire 31 teachers with the Central sale for five years. The experts for Johnson Controls told us a decade ago that we would be able to sell our empty old schools for $23 million dollars. So far we’ve made $3 million on sales. Every year we fail to sell these expensive properties we dig deeper into the red and lose more teachers. Nora should ask herself if her “special obligation” requires her to ignore the old adage: a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Yet, during those same five years, and as a direct result of the sale, our budget would have faced significant and increasing damage by a significant loss of state funding. Each year the Duluth public schools receive about $7,800 per pupil from the state to fund the education of our students. If a large charter high school is built and draws 650 public high school students, that is a potential loss to the Duluth public schools of millions of dollars per year. The Central site could accommodate well above that 650 figure and likely would have drawn greater numbers of ISD 709 students based on its location. Thus, the short-term gain from a $14 million sale quickly would have disappeared due to losses in student enrollment and revenue — losses that would continue for years to come.
Nora seems not to know what a great many Duluthians understand and has got her figures wrong in the bargain. Nora and other Board members have suggested that there will be no Snowflake High School. Doubting this they have come to see the Central offer as a desperate gambit to get the only building available to them. In this they are deluded. The DPSA all but has the state money in hand, they have the land, and in about three weeks it will be too late for them to consider buying Central at all. Millions of dollars will be committed for Snowflake High. What Duluth understands is that ISD 709 will lose students to the Charter school no matter what. If, Snowflake High becomes a reality we will not only lose money for the students that Nora frets about but the $14.2 million we desperately need now. There is an even more critical consideration Nora seems oblivious to – ISD 709’s brief window to make sure Edison never grows past its space needs for 650 more students. She is quite right to say DPSA could fill Central with far more students, easily double. But if ISD 709 does not negotiate an enrollment cap a successful Edison could simply build an addition to a Snowflake High. It becomes all the likelier if ISD 709 without sufficient finances falls into a tail spin. Nora and her allies refusal to sell Central and negotiate this cap leaves our District vulnerable in that distant future she fretted about in the previous paragraph. I’ve watched “Edison” for 19 years. They have never made a misstep yet. I wish I could say the same for the Duluth School Board.
Also, the sale of the Central property for use by a tax-exempt charter school would have prevented our city, county, public schools and taxpayers from benefiting from potential future property taxes flowing from a non-exempt owner or owners. This is a prime, 77-acre site. The county currently has the property assessed at over $30 million without any further development. The tax revenue on that amount could easily be half a million dollars per year.
This is a particularly threadbare argument. There is every possibility that the City of Duluth will designate the Central High site as another of its TIF Districts which are given up to a 20 pass on paying property taxes. Even if the property goes on the tax rolls the taxes would be negligible for ISD 709. A $40 million dollar development would only pay a couple hundred thousand dollars of taxes each year. Of that ISD 709 would get roughly a third because St. Louis County and Duluth would share it. If 709 got $100 grand from those taxes a year it would take 162 years for ISD 709 to make up for the lost $14.2 million.
The second reason I voted against this sale was because facilitating a charter high school in the Central Hillside would have a significant adverse impact on Denfeld High School. We are fortunate to live in this community, as we can presently sustain two excellent large public high schools. Because of their robust size, our ISD 709 high schools are able to offer a range of outstanding courses, programming and activities, such as a student-run restaurant, award-winning robotics teams, FabLab engineering courses, orchestras, lacrosse teams and aerospace physics. A centrally located, large charter school could substantially reduce the number of students attending Denfeld, greatly reducing these educational opportunities for our kids. I could not in good conscience support a sale that would diminish our ability to provide an excellent education to all our Duluth public schools students — east, west and central.
The difficulties Denfeld faces are a result of the shoddy demographic forecasting of the Red Planners. It needs more money and greater resources. This will be more necessary as it loses perhaps 200 students to Edison but let’s be honest. The greatest loses to date to Denfeld’s enrollment have been to Proctor, Hermantown, Esko and Wrenshall. What will Nora do about this? I will oppose a cruel redrawing of school boundary lines which would force students to attend Denfeld. There is a much better way to boost its enrollment – magnetize it with additional resources and programming. Frankly, Sadly, the concern being whipped up over Denfeld has produced more heat than light, in other words hysteria. We have two or three years to inject life into Denfeld. $14.2 million would give us a good start on that project.
Now, let us turn our focus toward creating a community-based effort to eliminate the graduation gap, developing partnerships to better meet the mental health needs of our students, successfully launching our Spanish-immersion program and extending our highly successful full-service community school program.
Good luck doing it without any money Member Sandstad. It will be even harder if angry voters turn down our critical operational levies in upcoming referendums. But who could blame them if they did?
