Although the email to the School Board has slowed down it is still running 10 to 1 for selling Central to the DPSA Charter. I had recommended to a few of these folks that they write the Duluth News Tribune but a great many new writer’s, whose names I don’t recognize from emails, have written the News Tribune letter’s column.
I think another constituency that might consider weighing in are the teachers of the Duluth School District who are struggling with insufficient support after the Red Plan began siphoning millions of general fund dollars yearly from classroom support to pay for Red Plan bonding. Some of them will lose their jobs with our anticipated budget cuts. Old Central’s entire third floor will be unnaturally quiet.
I understand the bitterness of teachers twenty years ago who took the invitation to set up the “Edison” School as an insult. At church one of them told me our Superintendent at the time exulted at a meeting with teachers that finally ISD 709 teachers would be forced to improve. This friend also recalled our superintendent saying he thought that teachers who took their work home with them were simply inefficient. I never heard him say such a thing but I understand how time can magnify and distort old hurts. (Beside’s that, my daughter who teaches at the Northstar Academy, brings work home all the time.) Both ISD 709 and our charter schools would be better off if we could put these caustic old grudges aside. And its ISD 709 that especially stands to shoot itself in the foot. We will not only lose a bird in the hand, $14.2 million dollars, but we risk never passing an operating levy again. Some of the folks opposing a sale of Central have suggested that the massive letters, emails and Facebook pleas to sell are just a “vocal minority.” If so, then the folks button holing me after church must be too.
I thought that when the Board nailed the coffin shut on a sale that dissent would die. No such thing happened. Dissent only grew more strongly. I suspect that the hasty decision we took a mere three days after our public meeting at Lincoln Middle School was designed to kill debate. If so, it backfired and awakened the ghosts of the Red Plan.
I too want the recriminations of the Red Plan to end. I view the sale of Central, as a peace offering to both Edison and Red Plan opponents. Selling Central could kill two angry birds with one stone. Until our School Board has a serious and honest discussion I would encourage everyone to make their voices heard and/or pay us a visit at tomorrow night’s school board meeting. You will have three minutes to speak.
