Repairing the Board’s wounded reputation

I just watched the first half of Ken Burns biopic on Jackie Robinson on PBS. It is a reminder of the world I was born into in 1950. I’ll catch the second half tomorrow which will show us how when he came out swinging for Civil Rights he put a dent in his fan base. It reminds me of Lilly who occasionally babysat me and who took care of my Grandfather after he was widowed. They would argue baseball and the Brooklyn Dodgers was her team even though she lived in Topeka, Kansas. When I looked up the “Lilly” link I discovered a mess. All of my 12,000 posts were altered when my blog was repaired. Now instead of apostrophe’s and quotation marks the nonsense symbols – “ – have taken their place. I just spent five minutes replacing about 60 punctuation marks in the Lilly post but that leaves me 10,999 more posts to correct. Times five minutes each that would take me about 1000 hours or 25 weeks of 40 hour weeks. I pray there will be a simpler solution. I’d much rather keep writing new posts than fixing old ones.

As I was saying I saw the Robinson biopic and it was good. Its second half begins tomorrow.

I thought I would publish one last post tonight. I just checked the Trib’s Facebook page again to see if the numbers had changed on the Sandstad/Oswald columns. I caught heck from Editor Chuck Frederick last summer when I wondered if he let his leanings affect his editorial coverage. I certainly can’t complain about the last editorial his paper published urging the School Board to set aside the policy in our path to sell Central to the Duluth Public Schools Academy. But I couldn’t help but notice that Chuck “liked” Nora Sandstad’s op ed piece but not Alanna Oswald’s.

It was striking what readers wrote in regarding Member Sandstad’s piece. I read through about thirty comments and I didn’t find a single one that was positive. Nora did get over 20 likes on them, including Mr. Frederick’s, but I didn’t see any one defend Nora’s point of view.

I think the school board seriously erred by cutting off community comment and dialogue so quickly and abruptly with a lot of misinformation still hanging out their in the air. This will have serious negative repercussions and it has been a publicity goldmine for Edison. It the latest in steps taken to curb Edison that have backfired.

I’m strongly tempted to bring this up once again to the School Board before the end of April when Edison’s contractors begin pouring massive amounts of money into paving over Snowflake. There is still time for us to reconsider.

About the author