News & Articles

As I waited for the Special School Board meeting of 12/22/14 to begin, I tipped an ear towards the hallway, listening for creaking sounds. I figured that by now the school district must have spent some of our tax money on a replica Inquisition rack for these frequent disciplinary affairs. I kept expecting an administration team to wheel the contraption into the auditorium of Old Central and strap down poor, silver-bearded Harry Welty. The medieval logic of the rack is to stretch out a person’s being, until he or she is a bit more receptive to the truth. Likely, it wouldn’t be long before Welty’s plaintive cries were echoing all the way up through the building’s bell tower.
“Yes!” I could already hear the tall, thin (and getting taller and thinner) gentleman crying out, silver beard jiggling as he renounced all his heresies (still using perfect diction, despite excruciating pain). “YES!! Oh, such a blessed gift is clear sight! Thank you, your excellencies, masters Seliga-Punyko and Miernicki, for opening my eyes!! I see now that the Red Plan is wonderful, oh so wonderful! And the sun does revolve around this Board’s majority!!!”
Hopefully Ms. Seliga-Punyko and Mr. Miernicki will never tire of snow and move to Texas. If S.-P. and M. ever end up serving on juries in Texas, the Lone Star State will have to bring back the cattle drivers of yore to herd all the inmates heading to the Death House. The toughest of this law and order duo is the Board clerk, Seliga-Punyko. At the last regular Board meeting, Clerk Seliga-Punyko declared that it was time she and her allies took a “look at school board behavior” and at “school board members who are misbehaving.”
Poor Harry had been deemed one of those misbehaving miscreants. By the time Seliga-Punyko and Miernicki were done with him, he was voting in favor of his own punishment.
“YES!!! Thank you, masters S&M (I mean, S.-P. and M)! Stretch me—please!—a bit further, so my sins can escape, and the truth can enter!”
Ms. Seliga-Punyko gave the audience two terse lectures during the procedure, which I’ll combine: “I‘ve heard over and over that we need to have—to rise up above—and set an example for our students and our staff that we will not tolerate people who do not follow—whether it’s data privacy, or just doing something wrong… We cannot have Board members slide through this. We have to hold a higher standard… It (this painful ordeal) is purely because of actions of school board members that we are taking this action. We have to take responsibility for violating different Board policies or things that we were told to keep confidential—we do need to keep them confidential.” (Any impudent rascal caught in violation must be taught a lesson for the good of us all!)
Watching one of the most dominant leaders of the Duluth school board for going on eight years now—the worst Board in the history of Boards, a bungling, unhanded, undemocratic, self-perpetuating farce of good government—place herself on a seat of judgment over some of her colleagues was sort of like watching an inmate climb up on an orange crate in the prison yard and declare herself elevated “above” the other convicts.
Of course Seliga-Punyko and the other four enforcers of Good Behavior did not allow the public to comment while they meted out their punishment. As always, they declared to those in attendance: “We’ll allow you to watch this gruesome procedure, but do not speak!” Violation of this rule may bring a creaking sound down an alleyway some evening and a loud pounding on a back door. Hopefully, the misbehaving citizen won’t have any issue with being an inch or two taller!
Not coincidentally, Mr. Welty is one of only two dissenting voices on the Board. That other contrarian, Art Johnston, is already in the process of being banished altogether from the boardroom of Old Central for allegedly engaging in misbehavior so disruptive it has given Member Harala permanent nightmares.

It all leads to suspicion.

Board members were told to keep their lips sealed about the purchase price of a pending deal to sell the Central High school property. Harry Welty revealed the price on his blog site. Board members were given an attorney letter regarding the Art Johnston investigation and told it was a confidential attorney/client document. Harry Welty handed it to a reporter.
Mr. Welty expressed regret for revealing the price on the property, calling his mistake “inadvertent.” He didn’t succumb to his punishment, however, without displaying the streak of independence that earned him this Special attention. He held his ground about handing over the attorney letter, saying he had “no remorse” for doing so because of “a huge miscarriage of justice where Member Johnston is concerned.” He also rebuked Judy Seliga-Punyko’s “standard” (or double standard) prevalent in the boardroom for years:
“I would run out of paper if I tried to keep track of all the different Board policies that have been violated by school boards of recent times… which leads me to wonder why only the policies the (Board) majority is interested in are deemed particularly important, whereas the policies the (Board) minority points at are deemed worthy of being violated.”
Less mincing with his words, Art Johnston mocked Seliga-Punyko’s claim of high standards. “You say we should ‘rise above,’ when what you’re doing… is stabbing a knife into the heart of democracy.” He condemned the whole procedure as “another charade.” He contended it was hypocritical to pursue any action under the Minnesota Data Practices Act in the boardroom, because school district administration had repeatedly violated the Act itself by refusing to answer legitimate data information requests from Board members. To prove his point, he read through a lengthy list of data requests he’s made as a Board member that have been languishing for months and even years.
“I think Member Johnston has made a good point,” Welty said. He elaborated, adding, “This school district—the administration and the school board—has lived and died by the withholding of information… I have been aware of many requests by Art Johnston over the course of four years—and before him, two years’ worth of Gary Glass’s requests—that have been routinely denied. And when people are routinely denied access to what should be public information—for instance, where $84 million of public spending went on (Red Plan) soft costs—it leads to suspicion…”

Being very sensitive.

It felt natural, once again, for the five majority Board members to be sitting in judgment and dispensing punishment on one of their colleagues, because none of them ever make any mistakes. Just as with the Art Johnston “investigation,” the motives of the five infallible were unimpeachable. They were just policing the standards of decent, civilized folk and rooting out misbehavior for the good of the commonwealth! Already in the process of teaching one troublesome Board member a lesson, it never crossed their minds to teach his homey a lesson, too. They weren’t out to shame and discredit Mr. Welty. They clearly had no intention whatsoever of clipping his wings and taking him down a peg.
Their actions were all very noble, elevated well above petty politics.
The high nature of their intention was evident in the reading of the resolution to censure Mr. Welty. Business Committee Chair Loeffler-Kemp, in her halting, alto voice, detailed Member Welty’s misdeed in revealing the price of the Central property in a blog posting, then added for no apparent reason whatsoever, “Whereas, on November 28th, Mr. Welty published another blog post, in which he characterized his public disclosure of the proposed sale price as ‘a huge mistake and boneheaded…’”
The five infallible would likely argue that Mr. Welty’s public and self-deprecating admittance that he made a mistake somehow proved even more that it was a mistake, but adding the phrase to the resolution was, in reality, just spiteful, petty, and bone-headed. Later on in the meeting, Loeffler-Kemp elicited sneering gasps from the audience when she declared sanctimoniously (and seemingly without a whit of self-awareness) that she and the other infallibles “were being very sensitive to Member Welty—to the death of his mother. We waited a few weeks before following up…”
Mr. Welty somehow managed to control his tears at this touching display of mercy. He graciously accepted on face value that the majority members intended “to make my life easier, though,” he added drolly, “moving this meeting to the eve of Christmas might strike some as a bit Grinch-like.”
?
Motives of the
complaining parties.

The meeting was another tension-filled spectacle. Mr. Johnston called attorney Kevin Rupp an “ambulance chaser” who’d earned $60,000 from the district this year. He pointed out that Rupp was the same attorney who’d also advised the Board to investigate him for making a racist remark, a loaded charge found to be completely unsubstantiated. Member Harala called “Point of order! Point of order!” a number of times, and members of the audience audibly scoffed at Seliga-Punyko’s lectures. Member Welty and Chair Miernicki got into a heated exchange when Miernicki tried to cut off Welty’s questioning of counselor Rupp.
Breaches of data practice can bring civil penalties of up to $15,000, and Welty was understandably concerned about what might happen to him in that regard. He questioned whether courts have latitude in levying fines, depending on the type of data breached. When he started asking Rupp about the procedure of pursuing such a matter in the legal system, Chair Miernicki jumped in and lectured that he was “dealing with conjecture… Down the line, if something happens, these questions can be asked.”
“The questions I’m raising are very germane—”
“Right now,” Miernicki cut him off again, “the only thing that’s—”
“Mr. Chair, you are talking over me!”
“No, no, no, no, no, I’m—” the chair objected, talking over him.
The heated exchange went on, while the underlying point remained in limbo. Was the vote for censure as far as the matter would go? The point was never made clear, and who can be sure with this Board? The chair did say, “Down the line, if something happens…”
The chair and his allies appear to have led us into a protracted legal battle with Art Johnston. Going into court with Welty as well would be sheer lunacy. The quality of the legal advice Rupp is providing should be reviewed if this reckless Board goes another step down this road.
A few years back, an individual named Tim Burke was censured by the Farmington, MN, school board. Burke’s case was an amalgam of the Johnston and Welty disputes. He was accused of divulging information from a closed meeting and other behavioral issues the Board majority thought rose to criminality. Fluegel, P.A., a law firm from Hastings, MN, strongly advised against prosecuting Mr. Burke. The reasoning behind the firm’s advice, outlined in a letter I have copy of, is interesting reading in light of what has been going down in Duluth as of late. Some excerpts:
“First, there is insufficient evidence of criminal conduct to support a criminal conviction… While much of the conduct alleged in the investigative report could be potentially viewed as unpleasant or abrasive, such conduct does not establish beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime was committed. Second, the sharply divided political nature of those involved naturally raises questions about the motives of the complaining parties. Third, the likely impact which a protracted criminal prosecution of this matter would have on the Farmington community also bodes against the filing of criminal charges.”
Hopefully Harry is off the hook now, because he’s such a nice guy, too nice for the environs he finds himself in. He even “happily” voted for his own censure. Very bright and dapper, generally easygoing, he bends over backwards (likely to be a bit more difficult now, with a stretched spine) to get along with his fellow Board members. He takes his majority colleagues out for coffee and tries to mend fences. He chuckles good-naturedly and always tries to treat people with respect. During meetings, he often uses quaint, decorous throwback phrases like “Gentlemen and ladies, if I could please beg your indulgence…”
His fate is in the hands of the Board majority members, and their decision will be wise and fair and correct, as usual. It goes without saying that we must not let things degrade in the boardroom. At whatever cost, a few misbehaving miscreants cannot be allowed to tarnish the sterling standard set by Judy Seliga-Punyko and her allies over the past several years. If you have any problem with that standard, you may hear a creaking sound in your alleyway some evening. Try not to scare the neighbors with your screams when you peek out your window and see a crew of school district administrators tugging on ropes, dragging the dreadful torture apparatus from yesteryear towards your back door.
It won’t be all that bad, really. Harry will tell you. Your back will be kink-free for the rest of your life, and you’ll finally be able to reach all those high cupboard shelves in your kitchen.