Among the millions of words I’ve expended on the Red Plan was a history of it that I wrote for the Reader Weekly four years ago before I was willing to describe Dr. Dixon as a liar. One of this series of columns was linked to at the conclusion of the last post. The whole kit and kaboodle can be found here.
Sometime before Lee had been elected to the Board she asked been asked by a County extension agent to mentor half a dozen Hmong girls who, it was hoped, would look up to a fellow Asian woman who had a college degree and business experience. Lee did this work gratis until the Extension Agent, seeing how much time Lee put into her volunteering, urged the new school board member to seek a routine stipend to cover her expenses. This would lead to the “problem.”
The supervisor of the program for the Faribault schools, who was not an extension agent, had an office next to Dr. Dixon. This was the Superintendent’s new wife, Sarah. Dr. Dixon showed his pestering board member the form she had turned in to Sarah Dixon requesting the stipend. The Superintendent told Lee that Mrs. Dixon’s, signature had been forged. The implication was obvious. Lee must have forged it to get the money.
If Dr. Dixon expected his board member to fold up he was disappointed. Instead, she demanded a state audit/investigation which she told me led to her complete vindication and did little to stop her from pestering the District for further detail on the District’s budget.
I believe this story. I wrote about it once for publication five or so years ago. It was never refuted so I don’t have Dr. Dixon’s side. I’m sure there is more to the story but the accusation that the School Superintendent was willing to use blackmail to shut up a critic is remarkable. It’s not the sort of thing you would expect from someone who’s mission is teaching children.
I’ve described Dixon as a prevaricator but this seems to have been just one part of a complicated combination of character traits that he made use of to get things done. The lies were strategic used to calm folks down, to persuade them, to diffuse suspicion. They were not always necessary but, predictably, when they were employed they often had the unintended effect of heightening suspicion. Faribault, in the Dixon years, had a large group of ardent Dixon critics including the teachers who once had a vote of no confidence in the Superintendent. I don’t put a lot of stock in this vote. No confidence votes were a tactic used across the state for a short time fifteen years ago and the Duluth teachers cast their own vote of no confidence in Superintendent Mark Myles while I was on the Duluth Board. Nonetheless Wai Lee was not alone.
Toward the end of Dixon’s Faribault experience a majority of the elected Board was made up of his critics. One man who failed to get elected became a source of much of the information given to Dixon’s Duluth critics, Steven Yewell. He once told me that he thought Dixon was a psychopath and that the only solution for Duluth was to fire him immediately. I replied to this email accusation by saying that if I was elected again to the Board I had no intention of firing Dixon. Instead I hoped to use his obvious charisma to help push a downsized Red Plan. As in Faribault Dixon had his passionate supporters in Duluth. I never got the chance to work with Dixon because at the last minute in the 2008 campaign I was savagely attacked in a local paper given out free to every voter. I have always suspected that it was orchestrated by Dixon behind the scenes. The author/columnist, Ralph Doty, another former educator, had agreed to speak with Mr. Yewell when he came up to talk about Dixon but unexpectedly refused to meet Dixon’s critic the day he arrived to hand over his files of newspaper stories from Faribault.
I think Yewell’s anger with Dixon stemmed from similar tactics used against him possibly when he ran for the Board. I experienced a few other similar harassments that I suspected originated with Dixon. On one occasion I casually mentioned in my blog that Johnson Controls had been dismissed from working with the Two Harbors schools. I received an intimidating letter from the Two Harbor’s superintendent threatening me with legal action if I did not retract my observation. The area school superintendents are friends and allies and I’ve always suspected that Dixon alerted his Two Harbors counterpart to my harmless post in the hope that he would help Dixon clip my wings.
These hardball tactics performed behind closed doors and behind-the-scenes are one more aspect of the Dixon’s character. Yewell and I were not Dixon’s subordinate employees and so we were not easily cowed. It was quite different for those Dixon had under his thumb.
Duluth’s school employees largely avoided me during the Dixon years but I did talk to a couple who shared their unfortunate experiences with me. One was fired, she told me, because she attempted to insure that Dixon would not improperly divert the federal grant money she was in charge of and the other was weaseled out of a job which was then given to an attractive young woman who, at the time of her hiring, did not have the necessary credentials of the woman she replaced. Dixon played favorites and opposing Dixon was not an option.
I was sent an anonymous email from an observer in Faribault who described how a strong-willed principal was handed his walking papers by Dixon and another Faribault observer’s comment that Dixon’s arrival led to a slew of departures by Faribault administrators.
“… he lost about 20 of the admin team while he was in Faribault. The communications channel was, if you said anything to anybody in opposition to his way, he screamed at you about it. I can feel my blood pressure rising just reading about Dixon.”
Wai Lee told me that Dixon’s Finance assistant had been given a generous salary which tied her to Dixon so closely that she tearfully told Lee she could not challenge him. The story wasn’t all that different in Duluth.
