…of the Red Plan are condemned to attend meetings to fix it.
I got a stream of conscience email today from someone reacting to a letter in the DNT glorifying the results of the Red Plan. As I’m away on a short vacation to show my grandsons some alligators I had to jump online to read it. It was well written by someone who home schooled her four children all during the years that the Red Plan was being shoved down the throats of Duluth voters with the fraudulent claim that compromises were being made to make folks happier even as the plan kept getting more bloated and expensive to the tune of an additional 50 million dollars.
It is a well written letter. If there had been no history preceding it it could be persuasive. I suppose if anyone were to be persuasive an employee of the Trib ought to be that person. However, it begins with the honest, cringe worthy truth that the new superintendent is begging people to attend his meetings. Why golly, hundreds of cookies were laid out for a paltry 11 attendees at one meeting. But no one’s coming. DULUTH! These are your schools. These are your children. This is your future. Why aren’t you coming in answer to the Superintendent’s pleas? I think I can explain:
Many of us spent four years attending District meetings trying to get someone to pay attention to our concerns only to be treated as some sort of cancerous malignancy. Now that the decisions have led to irreparable harm, a student exodous, inflating taxes (despite previous promises that this would not happen), grossly swollen classrooms, violence from a shrunken staff, the leprous citizens are being invited back to help solve the problems. I’m not surprised that cookies are not enough of an enticement.
The letter could just as well have asked black Americans to forget slavery or the subsequent denial of their rights of citizenship for many generations or ask Native Americans to forget their being cheated out of their homelands or the South to forget Sherman’s march to the Sea or Jews the Holocaust. Some events take more than a simple turning of the page to forget even when free cookies are provided.
The building of the Red Plan is not equivalent to any of the dire historical precedents I’ve listed. But the bitter taste it left in many people’s mouths will require time to be forgotten.
