{"id":21581,"date":"2017-04-19T15:10:06","date_gmt":"2017-04-19T20:10:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=21581"},"modified":"2017-04-19T15:10:06","modified_gmt":"2017-04-19T20:10:06","slug":"getting-to-know-you-getting-to-know-all-about-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=21581","title":{"rendered":"Getting to know you, Getting to know all about you"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As I was about to head early to yesterday&#8217;s school board meeting I thumbed through my notes I discovered to my great annoyance that I had overlooked a 5 O&#8217;clock meeting to discuss negotiations &#8220;parameters&#8221; behind closed doors. We had called the same meeting the week before and two Board members weren&#8217;t in attendance so we postponed it and I failed to note the change to today. Practicing my most inelegant vocabulary inside the safety of my Toyota I got to the meeting over an hour late with eight minutes to spare. I shared my thoughts with great economy and was relieved to discover that the Board members who were going around the table seemed to share my thinking. Had I not been charging my cell phone I might have heard the urgent text message that the Superintendent sent me when I failed to show up.<\/p>\n<p>The official 6:30 meeting followed and with an hour and a half of public comment we didn&#8217;t adjourn until 10PM. We gave the go-ahead to the administration to proceed with a budget that will require making $2.3 million in cuts after adding three-quarter-of-a-million to the expense side. Before voting for it I asked a question that had already been answered &#8211; would all the initial elements of this budget still be in play until we finally adopt a budget in June. The answer was &#8220;yes&#8221; so it was easy enough for me to vote &#8220;yea&#8221; knowing that I had two more do-overs.<\/p>\n<p>The Trib gave <a href=\"http:\/\/www.duluthnewstribune.com\/news\/4253082-duluth-school-board-oks-23-million-cuts\">a good reading<\/a> the meeting. My biggest concern will be how we deal with the spending recommendations of the Denfeld community which has some powerful arguments for the District&#8217;s financial attention next year.<\/p>\n<p>For me the most interesting thing that took place last night followed the meeting. I sit by the Superintendent during meetings and we write each other the occasional note. Bill (I&#8217;m beginning to call him by his name in informal settings to remove the distance that referring to him as &#8220;Superintendent&#8221; imposes) drew a picture of a mug of beer with a frothy head on it on his note pad and I replied by jotting down the question, &#8220;IPA or root.&#8221; He laughed and wrote &#8220;IPA.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I only knew that the acronym stood for something having to do with beer. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hopandwine.com\/what-does-ipa-stand-for\/\">Its not what I thought<\/a> but it definitely means beer. After the meeting I asked if he was suggesting hoisting a brew and he assented. I asked if he wanted to invite more school board members along and he did not object. Three of the board members had already beaten a hasty retreat but Art, Alanna and I coaxed Chair Kirby into joining us and we met down at Canal Park where we chatted and noshed.<\/p>\n<p>For me this was a return to the past. When I first joined the Board in 1996 Board members and administrators adjourned to Grandma&#8217;s or the Green Mill to unwind. We didn&#8217;t talk shop. That&#8217;s forbidden under the open meeting laws. Instead we kibbutz-ed and got to know one another. We are on the honor system whenever a potentially fatal quorum forms. The closes we got to such a flirtation was when Art quipped that he wasn&#8217;t the longest winded Board member at the previous official meeting. <\/p>\n<p>David and I talked medicine, children (our own), and classic movies. Alanna and the Superintendent talked about Western Duluth and the old days with Art. It was fun and I hope its repeated with even more board members after future meetings. It was a small but welcome step away from the Civil War I was plunged into in my first two years back on the school board.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As I was about to head early to yesterday&#8217;s school board meeting I thumbed through my notes I discovered to my great annoyance that&#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],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21581"}],"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=21581"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21582,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21581\/revisions\/21582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}