So much to say. So pooped.
Suddenly the also-rans, Kasich, Cruz and Rubio are pulling a Donald Trump and hedging about whether they will support him if he wins the nomination. Serves him right. He did the same thing.
Enjoyed Saturday Night’s Opener. They have been almost as good as the old days for the past month. The Presidential campaign is golden…… a golden turd ….. but when you are Saturday Night its a perfect object to throw at the audience.
Still, its hard to parody a parody.
I had a rather nasty letter sent my way yesterday. It put me in a feisty mood. I told its author I would put it on my blog along with my reply Monday unless they gave me a call and offered to hash its accusations against me out over a cup of coffee.
I also mentioned that my blog had been repaired. Turns out I was premature. I don’t know how to write a post in it at the moment and all the navigation that once was strung along the right hand side is gone. I hope its not gone forever with “the fix.” It will be very difficult for me to find old posts if I can’t put it back. I’d rather leave it broken and start fresh with this one.
I could put the letter here but this site will take a while to be discovered. I did have seven views yesterday but that’s a far cry from the 300 the old blog got routinely every day. I may wait to post the letter until I know into which blog it makes the most sense to put it. If it goes on the Internet it will lead to a big fight in ISD 709 which is about the last thing our District needs. Hope I get a call.
The offerings on television are far more sophisticated than in my youth. The breakup of the three major networks and our society’s casting off of taboos gives it a much grander scope and much harder edge. So, last night instead of watching episode 5 of House of Cards I suggested we watch Underground on our WGN channel. I had heard a story about the series’ premier on NPR yesterday. It was put together by two of the writers on the Heroes series and NPR billed it as a sort of action hero approach to the history of the Underground Railroad.
That it was. The primary characters all have the drawback of being made a little too beautiful in the American television fashion. I prefer the Brits penchant for finding interesting actors rather than front page glamour pusses. Still, I couldn’t fault the story line that the first installment offered up.
NPR mentioned the first race based mini-series from the 1970’s, Alex Haley’s Roots. For the next ten years every school in America showed the complete series to students. As I recall Roots was shown in tandem with the 1976 Olympics on ABC which helped catapult fifth wheel ABC up par with the big networks CBS and NBC. Once Happy Days went on air there was no stopping the channel.
I also remember that to a remarkable extent the series woke black Americans up to their history which many of them were largely ignorant of. For that alone we should all be indebted to Haley. (I never read Roots but his “Autobiography of Malcolm X” was gripping.)
Underground treads much the same territory as the remarkable movie Twelve Years a Slave. But as a television series, even on the also ran WGN it will have far more scope to develop its characters.
The anecdote I recall from Roots, although it could have come from Spielberg’s movie Amistad, was that during the scene on a slave ship with black actors chained together the producers made the hideous conditions in the cargo hold too lifelike filling it with crud and slop on the floors. It was so awful that the actors refused to take part until their stage was cleaned up. I am not one to clean up history but perhaps it wasn’t so critical to portray the filth so faithfully. The rest of Roots showed more than enough to open people’s eyes.
This morning at our Glen Avon men’s group our guest speaker was the Head of Duluth’s Northstar Academy and Raleigh School, Bonnie Jorgenson. I don’t pick the speakers but as a member of our church she was a natural choice. I do write up the announcements for our speakers in the Church bulletin and Bonnie wanted me to emphasize her plan to talk about the charter school’s future as it approaches its twentieth year of operation. I was also asked to introduce Bonnie before her power point presentation.
I don’t intend to repeat much of anything Bonnie told us. I will say that the flashpoint was the building of a new high school. This is something I know will happen and all I can do as a member of the Duluth School Board is to try and minimize the loss of 400 or so students that will attend Edison’s expansion. I’ll start with the name.
Bonnie reiterated what has been in the news. In a short time the New York Edison connection will be dissolved. New York’s influence has been negligible for many years, more or less limited to accounting. The Edison name will be defunct in practice but likely will live on for years in local parlance.
I said of Bonnie that I’ve known her since she was our church’s youth director and I went with her as a parent chaperon on four church youth missions to fix up the homes of needy people across the country. I commented on the humanity that she brings to her job and mentioned that my daughter teaches at the Northstar Academy and that my grandsons both attend it.
About midway through her talk one of our members, galled at the building of a new high school and suspicious of the private school appearance of Edison, asked her a political question that she was not prepared to answer. Rightly, it should have gone to me as one of the Board members who voted to bring Edison into existence twenty years ago.
I waited until Bonnie left to offer my insights on the subject. Our gathering lingered on for another hour and a half. That was a record. Since 2008 I have mentioned some aspect of the Edison Schools in about 80 posts on the original lincolndemocrat blog.
All through the years that Edison was being vetted and set up, roughly 1996 to 1998, I kept up an email correspondence with a charter school advocate in St. Louis, Missouri who was trying to get her legislature to pass charter school enabling legislation. We commiserated with each other and I enjoyed speaking candidly about the local politics and the pros and cons of charters. Our state, Minnesota, was the first to enact charter school legislation. It was a Democratic Governor’s brain child. I haven’t reviewed that two decade old email but I handed it all over to our new Superintendent, Julio Almanza, when he took over the District in 1999 presiding over a school board deeply divided about Edison. It was full of gossipy tidbits about the players in that decision. Julio could never quite convince anyone of his neutrality where the Charter was concerned. He mostly wanted it to go away but I’ve never had any doubt he disapproved of it and neither did the Edisonians.
The knock that Edison is, or appears to be, a private school goes back to its founding. Its not. Its purely funded by the taxpayers of Minnesota. I will concede that one of the primary reasons it was created was to get around teacher union’s inflexibility. No charters in Minnesota have unionized teachers. When asked about teacher’s salaries at Edison Bonnie told us what I had deduced from the beginning. Edison teachers in their first ten years of employment are paid about 85% of the wages paid to ISD 709 teachers. The salaries fall further behind 709 teachers beyond ten year’s employment. This, more than anything else, explains Edison class sizes which average 25 kindergarten students and only 28 students from fifth to eighth grade. Bonnie said they intend to keep to those limits as they integrate grades 9-12 into their program. That is a far cry from the sizes of many 709 secondary classes.
Many Edison teachers jump ship to the Duluth Schools for greater pay and Bonnie said it is getting more difficult to hire teachers. Nonetheless, Edison teachers like my daughter love their jobs. My sense of many ISD 709 teachers is that they bite their lips and smile. That’s a high price to pay for a better salary.
There is so much more that could be said and there is a good chance I’ve said it before. If you have four or five hours to read those 80 posts of mine I will have nothing but admiration for your fortitude.
When lincolndemocrat died in December I treated it as a sign…..although I don’t really believe in such things. The sign was that I should not write about the School Board lest I alienate new members and risk a renewal of dysfunction. After my return from Israel I’ve had two and a half months of meetings that suggest this will not be a problem.
But I still fight to sleep through the night. Its 4:15 AM now and I’m listening to Morning Edition on NPR after lying awake since about 2:30. Such truncated dream states are an Alzheimer’s threat. But I have so much running through my head. Who’d of thunk retirement could be so mentally exhausting?
On my mind:
- Resuming my blogging as a public recording of my diary either by fixing the old blog or continuing with this new one.
- Penning a series for the Duluth Reader on my travels through Israel and Palestine. If permitted to do so I could end each with the new blog URL so as to draw readers away from the old blog.
- Penning a book on my thoughts on the Palestinian kids who rush to their near certain deaths into packs of uzi holding Israeli soldiers. If they are prepared to die I’d much rather they put down their knives and follow the Martin Luther King example of peaceful protest which would make politics for Bibi Netanyahu one hell of a lot more difficult than burying them. Even the rapturists supporting Donald Trump would have a harder time sticking up for the IDF if this tactic was employed.
- My daily reading of the Bible. Last night I read “the words Moses spoke to all Israel…” Deuteronomy 1:1; including these: “…in each town we utterly destroyed men, women, children. We left not a single survivor.” Deuteronomy 2:34
- Making sure the Duluth School District doesn’t get slapped with an unfair labor standards fine for operating in bad faith.
- Curating my Grandfather George Robb’s newly discovered (to me) treasure trove of historical documents relating to his part in a signature moment for Black American history.
- Heaping abuse on the Republican Party which purged folks like me leaving the sheep like survivors vulnerable to a swaggering narcissist who has the temerity to insert copious truths about such subjects as Planned Parenthood, the disaster that was George Bush and job killing trade pacts among his even more copious lies.
“I’m a good Christian.” I just heard Trump say that on NPR. He also said “I love the poorly educated.”
There is so much to think and write about but, for the moment, I am the only one in my audience.
I have begun a new era’s collection of thank you’s from the classes I have read to. I have a very fat file of thank you’s from my past incarnation as a board member from 1996 to 2004. I kept them because one of the tips I got as a teacher years before was to keep such notes to remind yourself that all is not lost when you are feeling down.
BTW (By the way) The first 20 year old “bygones” in the Duluth News Tribune have begun to appear of actions taken by the School Board in the first year I became a school board member. So far the Bygones has mentioned our new policy, circa 1996, permitting police dogs to sniff school lockers for drugs and of a third school closing due to ferocious cold and blizzards. I think one bygones also mentioned our intention to seek bids for possible operators of a Charter School.
From these memories you can see that the School Board of previous eras was in the fast grip of current events. Nothing has changed.
I’ll be the first to admit that my Trump bust was not the easiest to identify by sight. The Tiara on his head covered up his most telling feature – his comb over. Furthermore lots of folks thought it was the Pope’s hat. Although the papal miters have lots of decorations a cross on the top front seems not to be a feature. I hoped that the pointing finger would have given the sculpture away but that still left people confused. Finally the scowl should have been the tip off.
Pope Francis has never been anything other than beatific.
When I first put the sculpture’s picture on Facebook a few folks read that the head was empty (I needed the snow inside to build the tiara and the tiny pointing hand. Some folks offered to come and fill it up with various unmentionables but I preferred the vacuum. It seemed more appropriate for an extreme narcissist. The bright light of day finally overcame my Donald and long after his nose fell off the head collapsed in on itself. It remains to be seen if the real Donald will follow suit.
My blog is www.lincolndemocrat.com. This isn’t it. I blew it up somehow in December and was too busy then, preparing to go to Israel, to seek help fixing it. It turns out that was a fatal mistake.
I was also reluctant to fix it then because I was about to start serving my second two years on a new school board with three new members. Three of the six board members who had voted to censure me on Christmas of 2015 had retired after a bruising year and I didn’t want my blog posts to stir up animosity anew with their replacements. (BTW – I was one of the six who voted to censure me)
The remaining to censurers are now the highest officials of the School Board. After taking these new positions they handed out very few committee assignments to Art Johnston or me. I don’t mind. That’s politics. To the victor go the spoils.
In fact, because of my trip to Israel I missed the Jan 4th organizational meeting of the School Board. Even if I’d been there my vote would have been in the minority and wouldn’t have changed the officer election results. (BTW #2 I had a potent experience in Israel and Palestine and would, for the time being, prefer to write about them and not the school board)
As I peck out this alternative blog (which may become the official replacement) I’ll continue to write about whatever I want to. National politics is one interest and what a year it will be. The School District yada yada yada. And most recently my Grandfather George Robb has been of intense interest to me. I got back last weekend from a lecture at the National World War I Museum all about my Grandfather.
I should make two things clear even though no one else knows about this alternate blog of mine. I have been treated fairly by our new chair Annie Harrala. She is being very careful not to encroach on the rights of minority members to participate in School Board meetings. Also, newly elected board member Nora Samstad is proving to be the cool, logical and fair-minded Chair of the Business Committee. She paved the way to burying our old tyrannical policies which denied Art and I the chance to ask questions at School Board meetings. They have been shoveled into a hole and covered up so that their rotting corpses can no longer stink up our meetings.
I have explained my absence from our schools over my first two years on the school board by saying that I didn’t want any employees of our District to be penalized for having been seen talking to me. My fear was probably a little exaggerated and to be honest spending two years defending Art Johnston from a myopic and tyrannical School Board majority was terribly time consuming.
Now the times are a changing…..sort of. Our new school board is composed of more rational people even though we are two years further into a deepening crisis. In 2013, the year I took a board seat again, we got a couple million from the legislature and, with my help, passed all the local levy requests we put to the voters. On the other hand, for the third time in the wake of ex super Keith Dixon, we approved a teacher’s contract on the assumption that buying teachers off with money we didn’t have was the best way to keep harmony in the District. That was very short sighted.
I am finally making good will tours of the schools. I began that process tentatively last year with tours of our schools. This February I asked all our principals to let their elementary teachers know that I would love to read in their classrooms. I used to do this all the time when I was on the School Board before. As of yesterday I had read in about fifteen classrooms in five of our ten elementary schools. Sadly “I love to read” month,
(February) has come to an end but I’d stack my Pig Pig Grows UP and Me First to any other classroom reader’s selection in the State of Minnesota. I hope the word gets out that I would be willing to read anytime. Oh, and I read three books for one grandson’s Northstar Academy Kindergarten class.
I have also attended four of the Think Kids meetings being held at our schools. I’m skipping out on the Wednesday Think Kids meetings because that’s my evening with grandsons. Despite this I can make a couple observations. The first of which is that hardly anyone is bothering to attend them. The four o’clock meetings rule out parents who work. The five parents I counted at one such meeting were outnumbered two to one by administrators and teachers. At another meeting I left when a single parent arrived surrounded by a dozen District Staff.
These meetings are set up to give the District feedback on what we need to do in the future. I have learned a lot from the teachers at these meetings but heard precious little feedback from our customers -the families. We were told last night at Congdon that 2000 people showed up at first Think Kids meetings in 2013. I’m sure they told us that they wanted smaller classrooms. Ditto 2014, 2015 and 2016. Many, if not all, of the other desires could be addressed if we had enough support staff or paras or teachers to fill in the voids. Evem after the legislature gave us a couple million extra dollars in 2013 those voids persisted but now that windfall is over and done with and we face a projected $3.4 million dollar shortfall for the next school year.
It was also stressed last night at Congdon that the Think Kids meetings were designed to focus our attention on kids and stop talking about buildings…..(“Red Plan” buildings). We are, however, still transferring three million bucks a year from our general fund to pay off Red Plan debts which grew by 25% as more ornaments were added to the initial Red Plan budget. We are still sacrificing staff to pay for the building debt. But as the Superintendent told the parents at my table – the only money we have is the money we have or words to that effect.
I still haven’t forgotten the shameless way I was prevented from being part of the teacher contract negotiations in the winter of 2014 after being seated on the School Board. I hope that changes when we get a chance to start anew in a year or so. Here’s what I wrote about my treatment after discovering just how shabbily I had been deceived. Its just two paragraphs from a much longer post:
Last night I was aghast to learn that another of my complaints against Mr. Rupp was for more grievous than I initially thought it was. He allowed our District to violate state law by keeping me out of a meeting during our contract negotiations that should have been open not only to me but to the public.
I’ve never revealed the full story on my blog until now for the sake of getting along but comity is long gone from the Duluth School Board and its time to face facts coldly. Last March I was left livid when our Superintendent, Mr. Gronseth, followed Mr. Rupp’s advice to exclude me from negotiations. This was despite Board conversations guaranteeing me access to the meetings and despite our board policy that made me a member of our negotiation’s team.
In the month leading up to my being kept out of those negotiations I was having a hard time sleeping because I was worried I’d find myself where I am today- up merde creek without a paddle!
lincolndemocrat2 