Faith can be as blind as the riposte School Board member Ann Wasson aimed at Kent Worley, Duluth’s renowned landscape architect. (Oh excuse me. As Ann points out he no longer lives one block from Ordean but has moved out of state. That should disqualify his expertise.)
I’d have preferred to have read the rebuttal of a MNDOT engineer or a City Planner willing to risk their professional reputation than Ms. Wasson’s views. I have rarely heard Ann ask questions during school board meetings. Silence makes them so much shorter. She finally roused herself to ask a number of questions of Let Duluth Vote’s Art Johnston when he made a presentation about how a Plan B could work last Tuesday.
“faith is closing your eyes and following the breath of your soul…”
Kent Worley is a professional who was the brainchild behind Duluth’s most significant face lift in fifty years – the remarkable I-35 extension through Duluth. That required a passing understanding of traffic.
Said Ms. Wasson: “Worley’s commentary was typical of some of the full-time facilities plan critics who have emerged: Shoot first and discover facts later.”
Ann does not seem to realize that Kent is no Johnny-come-lately to this discussion. Even before this Sept. 2007 item on the Let Duluth Vote website he had been criticizing the site’s inadequacy.
“Humanity’s first sin was faith; the first virtue was doubt.”
And faith can promote condescension such as this: “The next time Worley returns to Duluth from his new home in Michigan, I invite him to join me for a tour of the Ordean site to get the real facts about Duluth’s newest high school.”
“Unthinking faith is a curious offering to be made to the creator of the human mind.”
Ann says that: “It would have been easy to keep every school open, to ignore critical repairs, and to tell another generation of students the political climate wasn’t quite ready to improve education.”
“A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.”
There will be regrets. I finally got the open enrollment figures which show that the Duluth Schools are hemorrhaging students. That’s what had my blood boiling last night. I mean to put a little report together to show that if this tend continues the Red Plan will cripple our schools. The open enrollment figures show a trend line that should keep any thinking school board member awake at night.
Oh, I’m sure that this trend will not be noticed by the Chamber of Commerce’s business study to be conducted up at UMD. NOPE! I expect they will find that the short term gains of a dozen local contractors will be more than worth sacrificing our schools in the long term.
