There is so much about the Duluth School District that gives a tender fellow like me bad dreams. It was only a day or two ago that a DNT story mentioning a $7,000 income for school board members that led to a night of my mulling over school board pay. I went to bed after posting an expose then woke and retracted the late night post. Then I was sent the proof of a pay raise and retracted my retraction. Our school board had indeed given themselves a pay raise and, as far as I can recall, our Newspaper failed to report it.
Last night I was mulling over the information provided to the School Board last week (Jan 19th) by a school administrator assuring the School Board that Duluth’s public schools have not really lost all that many children to other schools. This morning I woke early and couldn’t help but wonder if this would be confirmed by the Census figures for the “Emerald City on the Hill.”
My thinking went like this: Tawnyea just sent the School Board a graph showing that Duluth School District’s student population dropped from 15,343 in the 2000-01 school year to 12,646 this year – ten years later. That’s just short of 3,000 fewer students. that is a dramatic loss of population. I woke up thinking about the population of Duluth over the past ten years. I’ve looked at the obituaries almost every day over the past ten years. I’ve seen lots of older faces in them over the past decade but not that many young people. In fact, in my own family we’ve added two new grandchildren children to the coming school population.
The last ten years conveniently coincides with two decennial Census years. I didn’t recollect reading that Duluth had lost 2,700 people over that decade let alone 2,700 children. My very first google search led me to this page from the City’s planning Department. On the first page of the report I see that as of 2006, when the document was drawn up Duluth had been slowly gaining population. The graph on this page shows the population of Duluth slowly ascending whereas the graph from Tawnyea shows our children’s population descending. Something seems amiss. I’ll look for some more recent census data and be back to you.
