{"id":11269,"date":"2014-07-16T10:52:13","date_gmt":"2014-07-16T15:52:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=11269"},"modified":"2014-07-16T10:52:47","modified_gmt":"2014-07-16T15:52:47","slug":"hello-mary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=11269","title":{"rendered":"Hello Mary"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You gave me your business card as I left Old Central yesterday and urged me to call you if I had anything else to add to my two hours of rambling. I appreciate your patience with me. As I write this you are in the midst of your interview with Art and I&#8217;m sure you will find that illuminating as well.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>By now our School Board has changed its policy book to allow Board members to be treated as politicians rather than personnel. (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.duluthnewstribune.com\/content\/duluth-school-board-opens-members-data-public\">Here&#8217;s the Tribune&#8217;s account<\/a>) This means that Art&#8217;s accusers may no longer be able to hide behind the public data laws with quite so much security. As I told you I&#8217;m looking forward to reading your report when it is made available as I have been led to believe it will be. I still have some more contributions to add to it.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m telling you all this on my blog because you indicated that you were well aware of Lincolndemocrat. BTW &#8211; My readership is peaking as interest in Art&#8217;s travails from curious bystanders, friends and foes alike check to see what the bloggy bs&#8217;er has to say. I consider it my to be as transparent as possible. Heck, I&#8217;m practically cellophane now that the Board has indicated transparency is a virtue. <\/p>\n<p>As you read in the last three posts I am having a little difficulty giving your pledge of neutrality the full weight you earnestness invites. I&#8217;ve drunk too deeply from Matthew 10-16 in the New Testament to surrender to my naivety. Don&#8217;t worry, I&#8217;m not a Bible thumper. I&#8217;m an agnostic which does not prevent me from taking in good advice wherever I find it.<\/p>\n<p>I have promised to send you at least two additional items which make two additional people a focus of your probe. I told you about an employee I&#8217;d spoken with who has a compelling story about mistreatment at the hands of our current Administration. I feel a little bad about alerting you to this person but I did take six pages of rough notes in my interview. As I promised you I will hand over those notes (copies really) to you after first typing them up. I&#8217;ll add to the notes my additional recollections of our conversation because I can&#8217;t take short hand but do have a pretty good short term memory. When we met I told this ex employee I needed five hours of interview in the two hours I had to talk. I think you will see in the fuller version I&#8217;m typing out that this employee offered a lot more than two hours of recollections.<\/p>\n<p>And I too am a target especially after describing my meeting with the Superintendent to you. I did, as I told you, write down some rough notes after the meeting in the event it should ever become a matter of interest. Surprise, surprise. That&#8217;s just how it turned out. I did do most of the talking. Those note are in a pile of paperwork somewhere in my office. I&#8217;ll get them to you just like my interview notes from the unhappy employee. I rather resent having to waste a couple of beautiful days at my typewriter after our cold and rainy Spring\/Summer but I&#8217;m leaving town in a couple days to visit my son. I guess I&#8217;ve got to get cracking so you can get on with your own work. <\/p>\n<p>I actually woke up after three hours sleep last night and began typing up the employee&#8217;s notes. Darn, I had really hoped for a good night&#8217;s sleep since the night before I hardly caught a wink of it.  I sort of hope that all the currently anonymous accusers are having trouble sleeping too. I know that&#8217;s sort of small minded of me but at least I&#8217;m being honest about my shortcoming.<\/p>\n<p>There is, of course, one more potential target, or set of targets) in this investigation of yours besides me, Art and an ex-employee who little prospect of a generous referral from ISD 709 HR Department for a new job. That would be one or more employees currently serving the District. Until the brave decision to blacken Art&#8217;s reputation I had no great interest in sifting through the latrine for archeological evidence. (Did you know that historians recently investigated Abe Lincoln&#8217;s old outhouse in Springfield?) Its funny how when one person starts tossing buffalo chips it primes other people to get in on the act.<\/p>\n<p>You have my sympathy for the tedious and dispiriting interviews you have to conduct. It can&#8217;t be much fun listening to people bearing so much animus. On the brighter side our School Board&#8217;s also just approved a civility policy. I thought you should know that in case it helped brighten your day.<\/p>\n<p>If anything else comes up I&#8217;ll be sure to blog about it. I&#8217;m sure someone will alert you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You gave me your business card as I left Old Central yesterday and urged me to call you if I had anything else to&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,35,80],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11269"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11269"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11271,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11269\/revisions\/11271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}