Evidently the Trib doesn’t put its daily “bygones” column in the online version of the Trib. But the version on the comic pages says it was twenty years ago that Duluth voted down a $45 million school bond. I fought to pass that bond. Some say that the Red Plan is necessary because we’ve let our schools fall into disrepair. Those who have read this blog for the last year know I strongly disagree with that statement.
I wrote about the 1989 bond a year ago. Here’s something worth keeping in mind.
For years various Duluth School Boards were much more focused on what went on inside the schools than they were with the school buildings. This led to several notorious mini disasters like Central High School’s leaky roof. The condition of the buildings seemed so dire that by 1989 parents organized themselves and pushed for an ambitious new building plan. It would have built half a dozen new elementary schools and a new junior high. In 2006 dollars it would have cost Duluth a little over 90 million today (one third of the Red Plan’s costs). It was crushed at the polls.
The 1989 bond was billed as the biggest school bonding plan in Minnesota history back in 1989. Figuring in inflation it would have cost $90 million today. That’s one third of the cost of the Red Plan that we haven’t gotten to vote on.
