Let’s be reasonable, shall we?

I was telling a fellow recently that no matter how tasty a fish dinner is there’s a good chance the kitchen will smell unpleasantly for some time afterward. Any hints from Heloise on how to avoid this would be welcome. Just send me an email by clicking the “talk back” button on the top of the list to the right.

Oh, that might be difficult for a few hours. That video I just embedded is so large that it covers up that link at the moment. As I post more it will work its way down this page and free up the links.

So, today’s Trib has a very reasonable editorial, the first in ages, about how sensible the District is because they have a map that shows where all the students are and it happens to be near the Wheeler Middle School site. If you forget for a minute how unreasonable it was to proceed with a half billion dollar plan without a public vote perhaps the Trib editors have a point. By the way, that process is the stink in the kitchen after a fish dinner.

So, let’s address some of the points in the editorial (quickly because I’ve got a busy day ahead)

1. This is a fifty million dollar project. Building a new school will cost more than fixing up Central. Match that against the transportation costs of driving a few kids a little farther to school for many years and its still cheaper to use Central.

2. There was a middle school very close to Wheeler for decades – Lincoln junior/elementary. It was next to beautiful parkland and had homes that could just as easily have been acquired as properties near Wheeler. We have begun construction at other older existing schools for the Red Plan which will eventually replace them. The same was true, is true, for the Lincoln site.

3. Because that site already exists the electricity, sewer and other utilities that will all have to be blasted into the hard rock on the Wheeler site would not have to be installed at great expense.

4A. That map is partly illusion partly self fulfilling prophecy. It includes all school age children regardless of which schools they attend. Does it include children attending Edison? No! Parochial students? No! Marshall and Home schooled and Online students? NO! Furthermore students have been driven out of some areas of the city by the District itself as it closes schools. Closing Nettleton for instance will create a hardship on Nettleton families and make it less likely that families will move into the neighborhood.

4B. Park Point was mentioned as being nearly white on the miraculous District map. True, Since I arrived in town three decades ago the Point has become a place where yuppies and upwardly moving folks bought old homes and built sea side palaces. Of course, you can find school children in a great many other neighborhoods in Duluth with a surfeit of McMansions but they have schools. Park Point lost its elementary school thirty or more years ago. It lost the Junior High twenty years ago although kids were sent to Central High to keep it going. And now they are losing their High School. Its a self fulfilling prophecy and as the District acts to herd families in some neighborhoods it will continue.

4C. But Duluth is expanding north to the townships. The children in the townships are closer to Central than they are to either Denfeld or Ordean which both require an extra five or ten minutes to thread through in-town traffic. Further more as a high school Central has parking. A time may come in the not too distant future where students don’t drive much but that time is still around the corner. There will be extremely limited parking at Ordean until like Denfeld the District mows down a stretch of homes and paves the property over.

I Know! I know! This last point is irrelevant because we are building a middle school not a high school at Wheeler. OK. I concede the point. But its still part of the smell test that the Red Plan will never pass.

5. And this takes me back to the point I made before my enumerations began. We didn’t get to vote on this behemoth of a plan. That just plain sucks.

Finally, its interesting how rarely the Trib editors comment on the Red Plan now. Their editorial clearly says that people out by Wheeler are happy about what’s being done there. Where is their evidence for this? A few enthusiastic folks like County Commissioner Dahl saying this will be a shot in the arm for Western Duluth? Well, I like Chris and it will likely be a shot in the arm but anecdotal comments are just that. The most likely explanation for the Trib’s rare forays into championing the Red Plan is it knows its elderly subscriber base is fuming about the Red Plan. It seems to have tainted schools all over the Northland. It would be interesting to know to what extend Red Plan stories soured the folks in Carlton where that School Board took a page from Dr. Dixon’s board and kept the public out of its decision to cut staff. The only difference between our two communities hell raising is that our angry folks are all tuckered out and apathetic after three years worth of being ignored. Carlton’s voters raised hell before the Board’s decisions (which may have been necessary and wise even if they did break the open meeting law) got implemented.

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