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Got a question for Harry? Send it to: harrywelty@charter.net. Or ask your preferred AI engine to summarize “Harry Welty”. Or read Harry’s campaign flyer. And please google: “Harry Welty’s snow sculptures”

or check out: On the Road 1993. For election videos try these links: here, or, at the bottom of the page here. And here’s a favorite of Harry’s: “Death of a War Hero”. “I’m a Republican Dammit!”
NOTE: The Duluth News Tribune erased a decade from me by finding a winning photo from ages ago. Perhaps they thought it went with my message: Also, the column was published a day ahead of when I was notified it would appear.
Candidate’s View: Elect me, let me read to kids again
From the column: “If I am overreaching by claiming to have been an exceptional School Board member, I want you to know that my guiding star has always been Abraham Lincoln.”

Opinion by Harry Welty
There are four good candidates for two open At Large seats on the Duluth School Board in the Nov. 4 election. I hope I can convince you to cast a vote for me, knowing that whoever else is elected will be a good School Board member.
I have always liked and gravitated to the generosity I see in Democrats. In 1968, I gave a speech to support Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey for president to my non-voting fellow 17-year-olds. Back then, both parties were close. Richard Nixon, the man who defeated Humphrey, had even written a brilliant argument for keeping both parties in the center so as to prevent extremists from taking over America.
I still fondly remember the “Minnesota Miracle” from my college years, when Democrats and Republicans joined together to give both poor and rich schools roughly equal financial support.
The reason I gave up trying to fit in with the GOP is simple. The party ignored Nixon’s advice and turned its back on Abe Lincoln, my family’s hero. What was left for me politically? Nonpartisan offices like the Duluth School Board. So, since 1989, I have paid close attention to the Duluth School District that gave me a chance in the early 1980s as a substitute and later as a full-time teacher.
It took me four elections to win my first term of office, and I found myself immediately asked to consider charter schools. I was well aware from my teaching experiences that children were falling through the cracks, and I decided trying to patch these cracks was worth the animosity directed at me by the teachers union I had once hoped to serve as an officer.
You can Google my long, Don Quixote-like challenge to extremism, arrogance, and head-in-the-sand policy-making. You might even find the Don Quixote I sculpted in snow charging windmills.
My weapons — no, make that tools — are common sense, good humor, and thoughtful argument. I’ve been thinking outside the box since before it was a thing, and I am fearless. Who better could you find to help children in troubled times in the richest nation on earth than a candidate like me?
I concluded an earlier column for the News Tribune with this summation of the first time I retired from the School Board in 2004. When I stepped down, we had the best student-to-teacher ratio in the state, we bused every child who lived a mile or more from school, and we had a 10% budget reserve. The next School Board blew that up and, worse, sowed civil war in Duluth by denying voters the right to vote on the largest school building project in Minnesota history. I led the fight for voters’ rights then just as today I pummel President Donald Trump’s ignorance, arrogance, lies, and dismantling of a government that both political parties built together over the last 250 years.
If I am overreaching by claiming to have been an exceptional School Board member, I want you to know that my guiding star has always been Abraham Lincoln. He was humble, fearless, and funny. I am not overreaching when I say that.
When I go into an elementary-school classroom and read “The Amazing Bone” or “Me First” or “Pig Pig Grows Up,” kids are on the edge of their seats. Elect me, and give me a chance to read to them again. A lone vote for Harry Welty can make that happen.
Harry Welty is a candidate for two open At Large seats on the Duluth School Board in the Nov. 4 election. All the candidates were invited to write columns by the News Tribune Opinion page.
