Or maybe the question should be – do fools make the best customers?
It seems JCI’s baloney in Duluth resurfaced in the St. Louis County Schools. I especially admire the trick of canning a bunch of teachers and then claiming their firing is part of the savings being realized by building new schools. Of course, its just the other way around. Duluth and the St. Louis County schools fired teachers to help pay for construction.
If the President of the Duluth Teacher’s Union felt more loyalty to his teachers than to the Central Labor Body he might not have been so quick to roll over and play dead as his teachers got the axe.
From the latest story in the Timberjay:
Voters narrowly approved the bond referendum on Dec. 8, reflecting a clear division between the northern and southern halves of the district. The plan was approved by a large margin in the south, but rejected nearly 2-to-1 in Cook and Orr attendance areas and 9-to-1 in the Tower-Soudan attendance area.
At Wednesday’s meeting, Helmberger disputed the district’s claim that it would save $5.6 million through its restructuring, noting that more than a third of that amount had already been achieved through staff reductions approved by the board on June 22, 2009. He cited school district documents that showed that about $1.75 million had already been trimmed through staff reductions, shaving the actual savings attributable to the restructuring to $3.1 to $3.6 million.
Helmberger noted that the district never shared that information with state officials as part of the state’s vetting of the restructuring plan. Even though officials knew in June that the district’s financial situation was much better than previously projected, the district and its consultant Johnson Controls continued to cite outdated budget projections in the report to the state in mid-August and up to the Dec. 8 election, he said.
