The old saying is “many hands make light work.” So too with paying for our schools.
I wrote in my first flyer that the new referendum would cost most of us a “couple hundred dollars” a year. I was woefully off. I made a gut based guess rather like so many Americans who think we’re giving 10% of our national budget over to foreign aid. Humanitarian aid is just barely one-twentieth of ten percent or about .055%. That’s 55 cents for every one hundred dollars we pay in taxes.
A $250,000 home will be charged an extra $60 bucks if we pass both levies.
It will cost me, let alone most of us, less than that. According to Zillow my house is estimated to be worth $196,000. Despite its noisy location on one of Duluth’s busiest avenues its a very nice home. Very nice. Its value is probably well above the median home value in Duluth. Yet I’ll pay less than $60 a year to salvage our schools and their High School English classrooms with 44 kids in them.
If you have lived in Duluth for a few years you probably know exactly where I live especially if you drive by my home in the winter and notice the snow sculptures in my front lawn as you pass. Drive by it again and compare your house to mine. If your’s is a lot more expensive you will pay more to save our schools than I will. If your house is more modest it will cost you less.
Ask yourself how much value your house will have if we let our schools go ghetto. Who will want to move to Duluth to buy your home and send their kids to a ghettoized abandoned school? Its a serious question. I want you to contemplate it with your head not your heart.
I wan’t to serve on the Duluth Schools to keep them healthy. I don’t want to be elected to be a butcher and leave blood on the floor because my only medical option is to amputate. That’s what I told the Chamber Forum on Monday. If I don’t sound to uncivil saying it, I hope those ninny’s support the levy.
