I will make one point about all the negative publicity the School Board has recently attracted in a busy week of editorials, op eds and letters-to-the-editor. Its no fun to take it on the chin. Most of us don’t have armadillo like armor just the Armadillo’s reflex to curl up into a ball.
I caught a lot of grief for disclosing the sale price of a since scuttled sale of Central High. I was a bone head to do it but when I did it I was under the honest, if mistaken, impression that the $10 million dollar sales figure had already been made public. That gave the censurers an excuse to embarrass me but my real “crime” was speaking my mind on this blog. And I got off easy like President Andrew Jackson when he was censured by Congress. However, what my Board colleagues did to Art Johnston, by attacking him through his partner, accusing him an NAACP board member of racism, and violence when the target of his “attack” denied that there was one; was far more vile.
So, please pardon me for an un-gallant moment of small mindness. I am gratified to have prima facie evidence that I was not the cause of all the school board’s dysfunction when I served on it between 2013 and 2017. Josh Gorham, who defeated me in 2017, has made it clear that, like me, he was appalled at the District’s hush hush attitude about public data. If there was ever any doubt that we are in the right, the $55,000 penalty Minnesota Courts forced the School Board to hand over to another “renegade” board member, Art Johnston, simply demonstrated that State law is on the side of transparency.
