My first take

Reading the words of Red Plan supporters is tiresome. For a year and a half they’ve brought very little new to the debate. The best Dixon can do here is patronize the people who have pointed out the flaws in his plan:

We spent thousands of hours…

We got input from the community…

We’re providing schools for the Twenty First Century…

The critics can’t decide what should be done…

The Board is acting courageously….

I called Dixon an old fraud a few posts ago and that is frankly too kind. One of the new Board members elected to get him out of Faribault said of him that he is a “chronic liar.”

I’m sure Mimi relished quoting me from my blog to show how common I was by calling the Ordean site crappy. “We want them to protest the pending vote to gut Ordean two years early at a cost of $51 million for a crappy high school.” If I were to rewrite that sentence today a whole slew of more useful words spring to mind – “deathtrap” for instance.

Forty years ago this City dug deep to put its most historic high school on a promontory overlooking the western-most point of the Earth’s most magnificent chain of fresh water Lakes. For ten million measley dollars, less than a tenth of one year’s school budget, they will sell it off to cram half our children on a postage stamp paved over because Dr. Dixon knows eminent domain is unpopular. Then rather than use this site for a western middle school he’ll spend another $45 million to build one on another rock outcrop below rail road tracks that will regularly fill the premises with dust from taconite pellets.

Meanwhile the pristine Ordean site that currently harbors a breeding eagle pair will be paved over.

If that’s what we can expect from the Twenty-first Century the Amazon Jungle, the Polar Ice Caps and life as we know it is in for a pretty tough ride.

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