Yesterday a smart critique of our (my) School Board’s decision to replace rubber tire mulch was published in the DNT. Rather than link to it I will simply paste it here in its entirety followed by the briefest of self defenses of the School Board’s rationale.
Reader’s view: Does Duluth School Board need to grease all the squeaky wheels?
Posted on Sep 6, 2016 at 10:54 p.m.The Duluth School Board, at the urging of some parents, decided to spend nearly half a million dollars to replace rubber mulch currently being used on area school playgrounds — to protect the “health” of our children (“Duluth school district moves ahead with plans to replace rubber mulch,” Aug. 9).
While people were busy praising each other for saving the children from this dreaded public health scourge, I thought it would be interesting to look at the overwhelming epidemiologic evidence that supported this decision. Oh, wait, there isn’t any. Hmm.
Let me get this straight. It appears the board made the decision to replace the material even though there is no conclusive information linking the material to any documentable health risk of any kind. The main justification for this spending of taxpayers’ money seems to be, “Gee, a bunch of us talked about it at coffee and think it’s a good idea.”
The News Tribune editorialized on April 28, stating, “Never mind that chemicals, some potentially toxic, would be found in most everyday items. … And never mind that chemicals in rubber mulch have never been found at levels high enough to elicit alarm or constitute a health threat.”
The board’s decision was baseless and arbitrary. How did board members measure this supposed public health risk? And how did they expect to tell if there was any improvement? What happens the next time a parent group complains about something? Do all squeaky wheels really need to be greased?
If we want to stand around and congratulate each other, there are many legitimate and worthy health risks to children that deserve our attention.
This incident reminds me of what comedian George Carlin once said: Scientists discovered a new disease today. There are no symptoms, there have been no cases, and there is no cure.
Dale Schroeder, Duluth
I have addressed the mulch issue several times and even expressed a little of Mr. Schroeder’s skepticism. He’s right. There is no smoking gun at present to show the chemicals in shreaded tires are a threat to children. There may never be. To be fair, it sometimes takes years for a dangerous chemical’s damage to become apparent. It was hard for me to rebut a chemist, and several talked to me, who told me it would be hideous to discover at some later date that mulch chemicals had hurt our children.
First a small point. Unlike labor contracts which build on today’s expenditures with “tails” as our legislators put it growing exponentially, a simple capitol cost is a one time thing. The cost, perhaps $400,000 will take care of the playgrounds until such time as it needs to be replaced a number of years from now.
Second a much more important point. Our District has fairly or unfairly been suspected by parents of not paying attention to their concerns. That was the case with the mulch. We are in a business where customer satisfaction is critical especially since these days we have competition that can draw our children away. Every student that leaves us costs us roughly $10,000 of state revenue. There were a lot more than 40 parents complaining about the tire mulch representing even more children. Losing just 40 children would cost us as much as the one year cost of the mulch but those lost children would continue to cost us state revenue each and every year afterward. That could have been millions of dollars.
I may be a dunderhead but I want our parents happy, our children’s futures safe and our District’s continuing finances as healthy as possible. I judged that keeping the shreaded tire mulch was not in our interest even if future studies prove it to be a benign product.
I will also mention that Mr. Schroeder is the only person to weigh in with the skeptic’s point of view. He had several months to do so while the debate was raging. Expressing his doubts now after the decision is in force is too little too late even if he is in the right.
