{"id":13125,"date":"2015-03-20T02:00:08","date_gmt":"2015-03-20T07:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=13125"},"modified":"2017-02-24T18:16:48","modified_gmt":"2017-02-24T23:16:48","slug":"13125","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=13125","title":{"rendered":"Bear with the Messenger while he shakes off his waking up …"},"content":{"rendered":"

…at midnight on the first day of Spring.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve not had many idle hours since returning from Florida Disney\u2019s fantasy land to the nightmare before Spring in Duluth. Today will be busy too. I donate blood at 8 AM then serve lunch at eleven at the Damiano Center. Hopefully the new crew of foam insulators will arrive while I\u2019m away and take up with a bigger machine from the job that was a tad beyond that of the first crew this week. Hopefully between errands I\u2019ll be able to pick up the small habitable space in my current office and do some serious writing.<\/p>\n

Yesterday was busy too. I vacuumed the heck out of the floors several times to remove particles of insulation. Some of that work was to tidy up before a cleaning crew came in at noon and cleaned up the rooms in the house that weren\u2019t full of the stuff I cleared out of the attic. Then I helped some teamsters haul fifty four-by-eight sheet rock panels up to my attic. Then I poured through a thousand or more old emails in a desperate attempt to free up my email system which is so overgrown with ancient email it barely works.<\/p>\n

I had gotten up early to post two emails regarding an acquaintance that was discussing the issue of effective school size. I gave her a little grief with my tsk tsking about her comment that I get myself educated on the latest research and she sent me a lol to let me know we were still friends. I wrote back that I liked showing the public how grownups could have a serious conversation something missing from my interactions with the Duluth School Board majority.<\/p>\n

I gave a peace mission one last try a couple days ago, after our meeting on Demographics. I asked the Superintendent to find some time for us to have a brief meeting. He looked at his calendar and informed me it wouldn\u2019t be the next day but assured me his secretary would clear some time and call me. It\u2019s been two days and no phone call has come. The second day I wrote up a strategy suggesting that we bring our School Board feud to an end so that we could turn our attention to the danger of a third high school. I explained how we could offer to work with Edison to convince their parents that it was in their children\u2019s interest as well as the City of Duluth\u2019s not to have internecine warfare between our public schools. That didn\u2019t prompt a call from the Superintendent\u2019s office either. I know when I\u2019ve become persona non-grata.
\nOur war will continue and I don\u2019t just have shovels to dig my trenches. I have bulldozers. None of us will turn out heroes as Art Johnston remains on the Board while the majority watches what follows in horror and disbelief. I\u2019ll be watching in horror and disbelief too.<\/p>\n

The day began with the really serious news that our District has been neglecting benignly for years \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the welfare of our minority student body. The Superintendent and the three women on our board wrote an opinion piece<\/a> for the Trib assuring the public that we were serious about racial justice. I\u2019m sure Rosie Loeffler-Kemp was glad to see it in print especially considering my description of her behavior toward Tim.
\nYou see a meeting had been called together at the old Lincoln Park School for a community discussion on the subject of minorities in our schools. It was prompted by the sour depiction of a lynching of one of our black students superimposed over his photograph. Displaying the sophisticated wit one can often find in a public restroom stall, the phrase \u201cHang em all\u201d was scrawled across it. The lynching victim was the grandson of a long-time officer of Duluth\u2019s NAACP. No wonder our quartet of writers wanted to assure the public that the Duluth schools were right on top of the situation ahead of the public meeting.<\/p>\n

So we met at Lincoln. I was there for three hours returning home at 9PM with some fast food and a soda too big to let me sleep through the night. That is the prologue to the next post about that meeting. I\u2019m reversing the blog order so that my regular eight readers will read the prologue first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…at midnight on the first day of Spring. I\u2019ve not had many idle hours since returning from Florida Disney\u2019s fantasy land to the nightmare…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[119,46,17,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2015-school-board","category-civil-rights","category-duluth-schools","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"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=13125"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19763,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13125\/revisions\/19763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}