Today lots of school administrators weighed in on the Red Plan and next Tuesday’s school board election in the DNT.
A spare little ad in the A section listed the benefits of the Red Plan in bullet points and was signed by some and perhaps all of ISD 709’s principals. Woe be to any who didn’t sign on.
We have a lot of new principals who I’m not acquainted with but I know a lot of the old timers. I make a special point of not talking to them these days for fear that any conversation with me might bring them under suspicion. But the grapevine which began drying up a year ago as everyone fell into line leads me to believe a lot of the signers on that list are there under duress.
Bill Westholm makes a case for the Red Plan by hashing over some history and concluding that Duluth never approves any long range plan so that we really ought to pass this one or we will end up in the same old rut. He lauds the research that went into the Red Plan but one telling word in his essay is glossed over and for good reason.
During my first year as director of school operations, I made a point of personally touring each of our schools to get a better feel for our building needs. To say the least, it was an eye-opening experience. With the average age of our schools being 50 years, with our student population dropping from more than 20,000 during the Baby Boom years to about 9,500 students today, with the sheer number of schools we were operating, with shifting demographics, and with increased financial needs but relatively flat state and federal educational funding, we had no choice but to downsize and economize. The need, to say the least, was urgent.
Could you guess which word I was referring to? Its “economize.” We are spending half a billion dollars for a million or two in annual savings. The other three million in annual savings is purely speculative and reduces teaching staff for no other reason than to make the savings sound enticing. There is absolutely nothing economical about the gargantuan Red Plan.
Another retired Duluth School Administrator, Tony Stauber, offers a shorter and even more compelling argument which does address this flaw in Mr. Westholm’s argument:
“Ignoring taxpayers is not the prerogative of the School Board. Its challenge was to hire a superintendent to assist in developing a plan to efficiently utilize buildings for 10,000 students rather than maintaining 15,000 spaces. Consolidation, closing and remodeling schools was necessary. An evaluation of the system was needed and done, yet the plans that surfaced were unacceptable to many in the community, and middle- or lower-range plans were never available.”
Duluth was given a Humvee by this School Board but denied the chance to choose a Prius instead.
