The Answer: Fear, loathing, ignorance and just a touch of jealousy. Its so pronounced that we will shoot ourselves in the foot and be happy about it.
You can see the results of the DFT’s propaganda campaign in this email which was sent to the school board after Education Minnesota emailed faulty propaganda to all the teachers just before the Board voted against the sale. This email passes on some of Ed Minn’s misinformation like the notion that, to quote the email: “For years, they have sent Minnesota tax payer dollars to a for profit corporation in New York”. If that was a problem you should see the forty-page list of vendors ISD 709 buys things from every month. Much of that money, millions each month, goes to out of town vendors.
What I don’t get is why it is taken as an axiom that Edison is going to take 600 our our high school students. We should have the position that that is not going to happen and we need to, to the best of our ability, be trying to prevent it. In what other business does a competitor move to town and announce to someone that we are coming and we are taking 1/4 of your clientele and then to have the audacity to suggest that we help them to do it! If they think they can build anything similar to the Central Facilities up on Snowflake hill, then have at it. It would cost easily 50 million dollars to build an equivalent site. They know they will not be able to match the Central site. Let them have their school in a swamp. If we hand it to them Central HS for a paltry 14 Mil, we will make them more attractive than they have a right to be. And we will help fulfill the prophecy that they will take 600 students away from us. (Except they will have room for 1000.) This is a $30 million site if you want to run a school.
This district has to assume the position that they will get no one. Nada! You want to build, go ahead. But it our intention for you to lose your shirt. What we have, you don’t have and it not our intention to make it easy for you to get it. Not at the cost is brings to the rest of our students. Edison does not care what kind of havoc they will wreak upon the public schools. They intend to forge ahead without a care for consequences. We have to do our best to stop the carnage they intend to inflict.
If you decide to sell, and their ambitions are fulfilled, you need to plan for a future where Denfeld High School has 600 students. Can we provide the services our students deserve and expect when you give away the economy of scale? How many years will it take for that 14 million dollar sale price to be lost as our enrollment goes down. Three? Four? This is definitely not a win-win situation. Their gain is our loss.
How much of our deficit issues can be directly tied to the loss of revenue for 1300+ students who attend an Edison School. For years, they have sent Minnesota tax payer dollars to a for profit corporation in New York. I am not sure where their money goes now, it is not public information. But they were a for profit institution making money by grossly underpaying its staff. They do not compete on a level playing field. Unless you can see into the future and guarantee that our students will not suffer a loss of services, course offerings, and quality of program, then you know that selling to a competitor who only gains by our sorrows is a bad idea. Nothing good for ISD 709 will come from this sale. I urge you to consider the long range impact of this decision and do what is best for the students of the district you were elected to represent.
Wishing that Edison public school families send their children to a “swamp” is a legacy of a handful of early Edison advocates who sounded like they were trash talking ISD 709. I understand the resentment. I feel the same way about not having been allowed to vote on the half billion dollar Red Plan. That said, bile doesn’t solve anything. In this case it clouds judgement. The more I have learned about the Central site the more I’m inclined to believe we will be lucky to make $5 to $7 million for it. Its only value is as a school. Otherwise its strictly a salvage property which could take up to $2 million for us to demolish. What a waste of good money for ISD 709 at a time it desperately needs to stem the out-migration of students which has been ongoing for the last six years.
