Sarah Horner, the Trib’s education reporter, who apparently lives near Ordean, was at the Ordean meeting last night taking notes. I haven’t seen a story online yet on that subject but she had already begun a new story which is online.
Sarah had gotten one of our letters in the mail and called to ask me what the results were. I told her that yesterday we had received 174 pieces of mail almost all of which contained checks. I also told her that was based on only a partial mailing to just half of the School District’s 40,000 households.
Later that night Trib Editor Georgia Swing called to ask me if she could send a photographer over to take a picture of the thick stack of letters because she said the picture stuck in her mind as she read Sarah’s story. I sent her to former Board member Rich Paulson’s home to take the picture which should be in the paper edition of the Trib tomorrow. (Rich had a heck of a time pulling the letters out Tuesday because they were so jambed in the box.
Sending out mail to every household was beyond our financial means when we began two weeks ago. We first sent it out to 4971 homes. That’s about one eighth of The total. Two days later I found 65 letters in the mail. If we had been able to mail to every household at once I calculated we would have received 520 letters in a single day. Of course there was no guarantee that other parts of town would have responded as enthusiastically. But using the same calculation with the 174 letters and knowing the parts of town we had just mailed to before the deluge of mail I got an even bigger result for all 40,000 households – 870 letters in one day’s return.
That of course, is a one day return. Donations always keep coming in long after a mailing goes out. The next day following our 174 letter day we got 78 letters. In a months time the number of letters we receive from that mailing may double or even triple the first week’s returns.
Only about one person in ten sends a note but already I’ve got a backlog of thank you’s to post which will take three weeks to get through. We’re still trying to figure out how to send an appeal to the Classes of Central High School. One class from the 1950’s has already contributed a thousand dollars to the cause. If each graduating class did the same and joined the citizens of Duluth we could play a merry tune for the tax paid school board attorneys to dance too.
