I didn’t attend the fourth meeting of Ordean neighbors but I talked to a participant and saw the late night news about it. WDIO reported that 80 people attended. Three city councilors were present this time. Jim Stauber was joined this time by Councilors Fedora and Anderson on both the right and left wings of the Council.
Tom Kaspar, one of Duluth’s best known public employees led the meeting and described several meetings with the School Board which the Ordean neighbors have had. He elaborated on the promise not to use eminent domain on the Ordean site which doesn’t mean it won’t be used somewhere else. (the current Lester Park schematics show that at least one reluctant homeowner faces eminent domain)
The rub is that the new Ordean schematics which once again crams the high school into a cracker box has to go to the Minnesota Dept of Education for approval in a month and there is no guarantee that the District will get the state’s OK because the new plans violate conditions placed on the site by the MDE.
Several other folks gave presentations about new hassles facing the building plan. Trina Legarde who has been birddogging (or maybe I should say eagledogging) the plan reported that there have been no permits requested to build near the bald eagles next. National guidelines are quite strict and the current plans, cramped as they are, will certainly violate the guidelines. The district could face a $200,000 fine for ignoring them of someone could be sent to jail. Trina has promised to send me more details about this which I’ll post later.
Perhaps most intriguingly, Michelle Bensen, a Duluth public teacher and Ordean resident to the East of 40th Ave E, explained that a group had recently looked at 16 attributes of a good high school site and that Central High met most or all of the tests. (Michelle was a master teacher who spent years helping develop the talents of other teachers. I’m afraid she failed with me when I was in the classroom) She asked for a show of hands from the Ordean crowd who thought it made sense to retain Central High in preference to East High School. Everyone in the audience agreed. This was quite a change for folks who at their first meeting had expressed satisfaction with the Red Plan.
In my last years as a school board member I was too timid to pick one high school over the other but I helped convince a lot of people that two high schools made sense. What I generally didn’t tell the public was that it made a lot more sense to me to keep Central High than East. In the face of the $300 million cost of and the abysmal planning for the Red Plan other east Duluthians are coming to the same conclusion.
