Teacher Tom Tusken’s Trib column represents the first such defense of the Red Plan by a teacher that I can recall in over a year.
I could nit pick all of Tom’s arguments now but since I’ve addressed them all in one way or another before in this blog or on the Let Duluth Vote website I’ll give it a rest. Tom’s letter expresses hope for the future and I can find no fault with that at all. Voters, however, will have to ask themselves whether it required $437 million in spending to remedy the flaws Mr. Tusken describes.
As for his positive experience as a student transferring from Morgan Park to Denfeld in the late 70’s I saw it myself. I was substituting back then and I heartily agree that it only took a few years for MP kids to fully integrate into Denfeld. But that decision was made to save money and husband District resources for programming. What happened in 1978 bears very little resemblance to the Red Plan. Besides, the controversy then was strictly geographic. Morgan Parkers were outraged. In the case of the Red Plan the entire school district is furious.
For Tom, a worker in his prime earning years, the tax increases may seem modest. For a senior citizen on a fixed income facing up to twenty years of %5 Red Plan annual tax increases embedded in the financing while his or her home valuation ratchets up the tax consequences may be much more dire. And even Tom may come to regret the Red Plan if the permanent and continuing $5 million in staff cuts is never made up.
The most glaring omission in both Tom’s and Nancy Nilsen’s defense of the Red Plan and Nancy Nilsen’s is the failure to address the absence of a referendum. All the heartache and uncertainty facing the Schools could have been nipped in the bud if the School Board had demonstrated the courage of their convictions by handing the decision to the voters two years ago.
