Keith Dixon only lied to me face to face on one occasion. He was so convincing I thought he must be telling the truth even though I was trying to trap him into a lie. I was so persuaded by the story he told me that it took me almost a year to confirm my first suspicions and blow apart his story.
One lie, however, does not prove anything let alone that the teller is a “pathological liar” which I’ve come to believe about Keith Dixon. When a lie is little more than a white lie like the one that we keep telling our Virginia’s about Santa Clause the word pathological is ridiculous. I don’t think that this lie which I’ll describe later was anything close to white. And Dr. Dixon’s’ larger lie was hardly white. It was in fact Red. The lie was Dr. Dixon’s assurance that Duluth was doing the right by its children and that we would be grateful for the building of the Red Plan. This claim was built on a lies, some of commission, some of omission. It also bred lies in other Red Plan supporters, allies of Dr. Dixon and vendors with a lot to gain by the Red Plan and others by people under Dr. Dixon’s thumb. They continue to this day, long after Dixon’s departure, by those dedicated to maintaining his many Red Plan fictions.
The first lie I know of was the one Dixon told the Faribault School Board when they were looking for a new Superintendent who could sell a school bond project to Faribault voters. Dr. Dixon told them he planned to move his family from Colorado to Minnesota after they hired him to be their superintendent. He was an adjunct teacher at Mankato, Minnesota, at the state university when they hired him. Why he had such a tenuous job is anyone’s guess.
Keith Dixon had been an assistant superintendent for a much larger school district than Faribault. He had apparently been in charge of building a new high school as the District’s liaison with the building’s contractors.
It’s hard to believe than an assistant superintendent had moved a thousand miles away from a good job to Minnesota without his family to be a part time college teacher if all was well at home. I wouldn’t be surprised if Dixon’s loose attachment to the truth had something to do with this solo move and abandonment of his family. Certainly it took very little time for the new Faribault Superintendent to begin actively dating again. He soon married a young school secretary who left her husband and children and ended up getting a high-profile job in retired General Colin Powell’s civilian mission America’s Promise to help troubled kids with an office in the Faribault’s Superintendent’s suite.
Early on the School Board was very pleased with Dr. Dixon. He managed to do exactly what they hired him to do – win passage of a referendum to build new schools. He was charming, caring and eloquent although he may have made a few too many promises that couldn’t be kept to pass the referendum. Some people complained that no referendum money had been set aside to equip the schools with desks and such stuff. Others claimed they didn’t realize that the new buildings assured the abandonment of their beloved neighborhood schools. But the complaints didn’t really amount to much until the consequences of paying to furnish the schools led to the defeat of two subsequent referendums to raise operation (classroom) levies. Perhaps Dr. Dixon had not been as straight with the voters as he could have been. In time the city’s business community would come to believe that Dr. Dixon’s departure would be required in order to pass a referendum which turned out to be the case.
That day would lie several years in the future. In the meantime, Dr. Dixon was saddled with his first critic on the Board. A Taiwanese native with an accounting background Wai Lee got elected to the Faribault School Board and immediately began asking lots of questions about the District’s finances. Unwelcome questions.
Much like Gary Glass, the one-time lone voice on Duluth’s School Board, her repeated questions received little satisfaction but did generate headlines. When ignoring Mrs. Lee’s became unendurable Dr. Dixon called her into his office explaining that they had a “problem.”
