After cramming all 6th, 7th and 8th graders into two schools to expedite the building of the Red Plan and thwart voters from replacing the school board Dr. Dixon now is using the misery created by the move to threaten parents. If you vote for a new school board your kids will stay in these hellholes Bwahahahahaha!
Of course, such a naked threat would not go down well so he offers a bit of a carrot implying that reelecting the incumbents would pave the way to releasing the kids at the end of the school year. Of course, this will just cause a couple more years of traumatic moves. These rolling blackouts all be made much worse because of the smaller faculty necessitated by funding the expedited construction.
“Temporary consolidations like Woodland, Ordean and Lincoln Piedmont would last longer or become permanent, disrupting families and neighborhoods.”
I’m struck at how his Budgeteer column is dressed up to sound reasonable while glossing over three very uncompromising years to get his vision put into place with no significant alterations. It reminds me of lion who kills the cubs of a lionesses in order to mate with her.
As for the threat of keeping these unhappy kids crammed in these schools that parents are begging to have their children transferred from to the extent it might, MIGHT be true, its Dixon’s responsibility. He rush the building schedule knowing the potential consequences. Its quite likely that Ordean or East High could be used as a junior high next year.
Short of an atomic bomb, which isn’t something I would put past this lame duck school board to detonate, a new school board could swiftly call a halt to the most costly and poorly thought out elements of the Red Plan.
As for Dr. Dixon’s brief references to studies that suggest new buildings improve test scores it must be remembered that anyone can pull out a study that “proves” whatever they want to prove. My intuition, my experience and my own look at various academic studies tells me that this claim is mostly hooey. Aside from specialized science labs and good athletic facilities most learning does not require “shiny new buildings.” In fact, I heard that 25 of our former students have recently retreated from the public schools to do their studies on the Internet. They can do this from home. Imagine pouring money into high schools which could lose a quarter of their students to the Internet or to classes at local colleges. My son (who detested high school but not because of the school building) has gushed over the new science facility at UMD. PSEO (Post Secondary Education Options) classes are easily available for ambitious high schools students.
My daughter took one of the best science classes available in the Duluth Schools – Anatomy. It was taught by a magnificent teacher in a terribly inadequate laboratory environment. My daughter spent a year dissecting a cat that she and her lab partner nicknamed “Squeever.” My daughter is not all that interested in biology but the teacher of that class had an impressive, no that’s too mild a superlative, a magnificent record of inspiring students to embark on medical careers. That class was a victim of the loss of the seven-period day during my last years on the School Board. You can expect more of these kinds of cuts if Dr. Dixon and his school board prevail this fall.
