When I taught myself how to juggle in my thirties I discovered the juggler’s walk. It begins shortly after a person learns to juggle and the temptation is to keep the items juggled from bumping into your chest. Balls and beanbags get thrown ever so slightly forward so that the new juggler, intent on tossing and catching, begins to find himself walking forward so as not to miss catches that are thrown forwards too much. Suddenly the juggler begins a slow march forward.
Today after Church, about which I’ll have a few things to say, I had to feed our stubby tailed cat Moloch. Moloch is yellow and tabbies have a reputation for always wanting to eat. The problem with Moloch is that he eats so fast he barfs everything up again and then wants more food to fill his empty stomach. Cleaning up after a cat regularly is [insert cheap joke here].
To slow down Moley I have taken to rationing him to about 17 kibble bits on four separate feedings a day. After church we were half an hour late and he was, as he always seems to be, waiting at the back door for me. For the past month I’ve taken to tossing one kibble at a time up the basement stairs forcing him to chase up after them. I won’t toss another until he comes all the way back down the stairs. Towards the end he gets a little tired of the game so if he doesn’t come down quickly enough I take that as a cue that any more food will require windex and a clean up. Today as I fed Moley I paced like crazy all over my basement between kibble tosses. I looked like a big cat behind a cage. In my case it was sort of a juggler’s walk. I had so many things on my mind I wanted to blog about I paced furiously to keep them in my head instead of letting them falling away.
My family is taking a walk in the sun without me. I’m not going. I told them I have to prepare more information for my fellow board members per my promise to Chair Harala to provide it. Frankly, the recent information I’ve given them about Red Plan finances and the value of Central ought to be all I need. But as I told a half dozen people at church I don’t expect a change in the 4 to 3 vote from a couple weeks ago. Still, I promised and I plan to honor it.
At church today one fellow made his disgust with me quite plain. I’m a rabble rowser to him who just like’s to “stir the pot.” Evidently he thinks I get my jollies from pissing people off. Through the Church service I fought not to think about the conversation I ought to have with him. He’s been a little more light-hearted in past dust-ups.
After church a predictable group of fellow dropped by to urge me on. They were joined by another who has been adamantly opposed to a sale of Central to Edison, not “because he’s against Edison,” but because he thinks three high schools is ridiculous. It is. I spent my last years on a previous school board saying the same thing much to the irritation of many people in Duluth. And yet….
This fellow told me he read my blog often so in that respect my writing serves the purpose of letting ISD 709 wonks know how I look at things. He freely explained that he is against the sale but added that on the chance there was a change in the votes we consider a couple of his suggestions. I told him one of them was a particularly good idea. He suggested that instead of putting an end date for a DPSA enrollment cap we insert in our contract a provision that would require an ISD 709 school board “super-majority” of perhaps 5-2 to lift the cap at some uncertain date in the future. I had a similar idea myself although not with a super-majority.
This fellow had written a long and eloquent email in opposition to the sale a month ago. I meant to respond to it as well as the email of another thirty or so sale critics. I never got around to it. I’ve been doing a lot of pacing instead for the past three weeks.
There is one more thing I’d like to mention. Everyone is a prisoner of the past and that is oh, so true of the Duluth School Board. Here are a few of the links in the chain:
* Minnesota passed the PELRA law in 1971 that gave teachers the right to strike.
* Teachers began striking in the 1970’s and 80’s
* Teachers started getting more money which was aided by another law passed in 1971 called the Minnesota Miracle.
* Now teachers were being paid much more because roughly 70% of their wages came from the state and school boards no longer had to raise as much in local property taxes. Thank you very much St. Paul.
* Legislators in the 1990’s began hearing complaints that state taxes were going up too much and slowed down what they gave school districts who’s boards were happy to raise teacher’s salaries as long as the state was digging into the pockets of taxpayers.
* When the spigot was turned off School Board’s began giving teacher’s alternative goodies instead of high salaries like freedom from too many class assignments or lunch room or hall monitoring duty or restrictions on contract days and on and on and on….
* Administrations began feeling the pinch as they had to hire other part time folks to take on these onerous activities at a much lower non-skilled rates of pay.
* Angry administrators in Duluth looking for a way to thwart union micromanagement discovered charter schools which would avoid any union bottleneck.
* Even before this took place DFL Governor Rudy Perpich, a former frustrated Hibbing School Board member, came up with the idea of “open enrollment allowing students to flee school districts they were dissatisfied with. Suddenly schools lost their power of monopoly which had increased with the demise of Parochial high schools.
* In Duluth in 1989 a group of parents who desperately wanted new schools attempted to pass a “huge” $50 million building referendum often described at the time as being the biggest in Minnesota History. It was defeated and many of the supporter blamed “selfish” old farts. When the $257 million Red Plan was proposed without a referendum in 2007 the bitter supporters of the earlier defeated building referendum danced on the graves of those selfish old folks. Their school board members smugly explained that they were elected to make these decisions (even though this was certainly not the case in any other Minnesota School Districts.
* Inbetween the failed referendum and the non referendum Red Plan Duluth invited in a charter school (another one of Governor Rudy Perpich’s brainstorms) and pissed off the teacher’s union royally.
* Supporters of the failed referendum and teachers could both pray that new schools would lure back all the students from charter schools.
* To prevent voters from being too pissed off this time they made unpardonably impossible promises about the plan being paid for by “savings,” “energy rebates,” “efficiencies,” and “building sales.”
* When this turned out to be a mirage and the schools began cutting teachers and programming ………
You get the picture and I haven’t even listed the Central Roof.
We are all prisoners of the past and I’m reduced to a furious juggler’s walk.
And one more thing about Church. Ten years ago I asked the congregation to pray over a political issue during a church service. I asked that we pray for Duluth as it became apparent that there would be no referendum on the Red Plan. Claudia thought it was a terribly inappropriate thing for me to ask for. God may have agreed. I was an agnostic.
