https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwuyk9KM7A4
Much to my annoyance this link takes you to the video of yesterday’s School Board’s special meeting that won’t play for me. That’s where we reauthorized bonding for $3 million in construction that would mostly have been unnecessary if we had simply sold Rockridge Elementary to a “competitor” Many Rivers Academy or sold them Nettleton which still sits empty on the market. Instead we were forced to spend a lot of money on this school to educate the non residential students from Woodland Hills (now the “Hills”). We had to reauthorize it because we are asking the city to let Rockridge be used as a school again after asking them to take away that zoning so we could sell the building to pay off part of the Red Plan.
The Hills simply sold our old Cobb school to Many Rivers so we lost a buyer and Many Rivers got one of our old schools anyway.
I made that point in a more business-like fashion at the meeting which I thought made a nice contrast with yesterday’s informal video chat that I appended to the previous post.
Our finances drive me nuts. After my soliloquy the only non candidate/non employee witness at our meeting said he wished that the two folks he had spoken to a short time ago had heard the meeting. They had insisted that ISD 709 had to fix up the old schools because they had never been taken cared for. This trope took on two silly myths. First, that old School Board’s neglected their duty to fix up the Duluth schools. Second, that having allowed them to become decrepit there was nothing we could do but spend half a billion dollars on the Red Plan.
What the last ten year’s worth of School Boards did was insist that they were going to save us half the cost of new schools with energy savings and efficiencies. That was nonsense. As my trading cards make clear, and as I have suggested for the last ten years, all they did was fire teachers to pay for new schools. Today we only put $2.5 million of our $31 million dollars of property taxes into the classroom. Twenty years ago we put $14 million of $23.5 million into the classrooms. 137 teachers were let go to pay for those buildings. Now we are borrowing more because of a policy that handcuffs common fiscal sense.
I’m heading off to the airport in ten minutes to fly to a family reunion in Colorado for the next four days. But I’m taking my computer. I may want to add some more posts while I’m away. I have one in mind about one of the genius’s who made it possible to pay for the Red Plan on the backs of our children. I think I’ll title it Hi Ho, Hi Ho, Hoheisel. I’ll have to be careful though. He likes to threaten to sue people.
