News & Articles

After the last election, a newly-elected Board member said to me: “We (the new, wiser Board) will probably be too boring for you to write about.”
“Based on my experience in this room,” I responded, a bit sarcastically, “I don’t see that as a potential problem.”
In Duluth, we have the most ironic of all government entities: a school board completely incapable of learning. For over a decade it’s kept repeating the same mistakes over and over and over.

HR and Business Committee meetings, 10/10/16.

I don’t often write about Board committee meetings, but these two deserve everyone’s attention, because there were border skirmishes that could very well lead to another all-out war. The conflict started in the HR committee, during debate around the Superintendent’s contract. The details of the contract aside (I’m hoping to find time to write an article on the subject,) the strife to a large extent centered around the idea that the contract had popped up out of thin air, again without any input from the full Board.
The Board’s only legal obligation is to inform the Superintendent by November if it isn’t going to offer him another contract, starting July 1st, 2017. In the last contract round, the Board approved the contract in March, three months before his contract expired. This time around, the Board majority and the Superintendent were trying to cajole the Board into approving his contract during the October meeting, more than eight months before his current contract expires.
Member Alanna Oswald pointed out that the Board hadn’t even done its required evaluation of the Superintendent’s job performance, yet.
“I have to express my concern about voting to extend a contract for a Superintendent I have yet to evaluate. I think that in any general business, that you don’t have your contract (approved,) and then we look at how you did.”
Even one of the majority members, Nora Sandstad, thought this way of doing business seemed a bit skewed: “I would agree with member Oswald that the timing of the evaluation should happen before a contract is renewed.”
But it wasn’t the rush job alone that ruffled feathers, it was the secret process that short-changed the Board’s ability to do its job as a collective body. The Superintendent passed his wishes (including a pay raise) onto the HR manager, Tim Sworsky, who, using the current contract as a template, took it upon himself to put a new contract together. The only Board input was apparently from Chair Annie Harala, who has increasingly decided she is the sole seat of power.
Some Board members took serious umbrage at the fact that they were handed a contract--in effect, already negotiated without their knowledge--and were being told they were supposed to vote on it the following week. This is the way member Welty expressed the frustration, rising to resentment, some members feel about always being kept out of the loop until the last second on major decisions:
“Perhaps it is my fault for not extending myself further to the people who seem to be forming a (permanent) 3-4 majority that I have to deal with, but I get lots of surprises, and this contract is now (another) surprise. (If) I had been apprised of it, I could have given some thought (to it,) and perhaps had some private conversations with other Board members, but now I may be forced to vote for this next Tuesday. And I’m not sure that I’m prepared to vote, ‘Yes,’ for this, next Tuesday…”

Next Tuesday’s meeting could be quite vexing.

Chair Harala and Clerk Rosie Loeffler-Kemp--the senior, dominant voices of the majority--were both absent from this meeting, but hopefully they will watch the youtube video. What they won’t see on video was the deep degree of frustration shown by the three minority members Art Johnstone, Harry Welty and Oswald in the hallway of Old Central--after two and a half hours of meetings inside the boardroom--as they tried to persuade the Superintendent to not only show some concern for their plight, but also for a tenuous Board seemingly slipping back into an old rut that could easily lead to another conflagration.
Member Welty’s public speech during the HR meeting outlined the concerns the minority have about the heavy-handedness of the majority Board members and administration: “I told the Superintendent a year ago about how my first two years (on the Board) were just awful. And while this year has been an improvement, I still get lots of surprises. And perhaps this is not the Superintendent’s fault, but for instance, today, after abiding by the policy that we, as a Board, passed earlier in the year--that three Board members could add something to the agenda-- (Policy 203.5, which states: “Upon written request of three Board members, delivered to the Chair no later than the Friday before an agenda-setting session, an item will be placed on the agenda…) I find that there is a resolution that defies all logic. (A resolution) that apparently gives the four-person majority the chance to prevent us from putting something on the agenda. Now, it would be my observation that something like that would be a red flag, and somebody who is good at working with people…might be able to talk somebody--like our Chair--out of that kind of foolishness. Getting a contract, without any heads-up, that is eight months premature, is foolishness. Having four--million dollar and multi-million dollar offers for the sale of buildings causing us all kinds of difficulties--and having (those offers) hidden from the minority, and in fact, as the Chair said: (hidden from) all six of the rest of us on the Board, is not the kind of transparency that I think a Superintendent would want to encourage if he wanted to have a school board that was a unified group of people.”
For those readers who haven’t heard: Many Rivers Montessori school has made offers on some of district 709’s Red Plan-vacated properties. Chair Harala is telling everyone that only she and Administration knew about the offers, but many suspect other members of the privileged ruling Board majority knew as well. Chair Harala is justifying not making the offers public, because last spring the Board majority upheld a district policy barring a sale of property to other K-12 competitors.
The minority members only found out about the offers from the Montessori school after the Head of School sent a letter to the Board, asking for the “courtesy of a meeting” in regard to the offers. Minority members wanted to extend that courtesy to Many Rivers, and submitted an agenda item which stated that they were asking for: “consideration of the request from Many Rivers Montessori for the courtesy of a meeting to discuss the merits of Many Rivers Montessori’s requests to purchase available district properties, in a letter to the entire school board dated Sept. 20, 2016. This agenda item will include discussions with Mr. Mark Niedermier, Head of School, Mr. John Kliewer, Chair of the Board of Trustees, and any other individuals Many Rivers Montessori deems appropriate to participate should they wish to attend.”
During the meeting, Nora Sandstad, an attorney, creatively circumvented the intent of policy 203.5 by arguing that the first word, “consideration,” gave the majority the necessary latitude to change the resolution. In other words: “We did give your agenda item adequate ‘consideration,’ and decided, ‘not gonna happen.’” The majority took it upon themselves to replace the minority’s resolution with a substitute (the same trick they pulled during the debate about the sale of the Central property to Edison.) The resolution is too wordy for this format. It repeats the word, “whereas,” four times, but the last line in the most important:

“NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the School Board directs the District’s Administration to schedule a meeting to discuss the merits of a PK-12 educational provider’s interest in purchasing available school district properties.”
Under this new, very clever manipulation of the process, the full Board will vote on whether or not it directs administration to set up a meeting with Many Rivers Montessori, and guess who will automatically win THAT vote? Hint: it ain’t the minority.
To recap this wonderful example of democracy in action: the majority high-jacked the agenda and substituted a rigged resolution that allowed it to sabotage the intent of the minority’s properly submitted original resolution.
After putting up with these kinds of shenanigans for seven years,  Art Johnston, alias the Lone Ranger,  did not exactly mince his words: “We wanted to have a discussion (with Many Rivers)--pure and simple. And you (the majority) had no right whatsoever to deny us that. None whatsoever.”
“There’s a difference between consideration of a meeting and having a meeting.” Committee Chair Sandstad pointed out, venturing into her wordplay. “Maybe your request was not worded with the intent that you wanted.”
“You’re talking like a lawyer!” The Lone Ranger disparagingly told the lawyer. “We happen to be three Board members who have a right to have an agenda item…Nobody else in the city had that understanding of (the minority’s resolution.) Nobody else, including Chair Harala, when she sent text messages to Alanna Oswald and emails to me--asking if we could sit down and talk this over. I said, ‘Yeah, let’s sit down and talk it over.’ But it didn’t happen. Everyone knew what it (the resolution) was. Everybody knew, including all the media in this town.”

Pulverizing policy.

Member Kirby stated the position of the majority succinctly: “I think policy was followed. The policy now reads that we won’t consider requests for a sale of property to other schools.”
In other words, the majority was making the argument that the mattered was settled during the debate over Edison buying the Central property, and the policy is now set in stone for any offer that comes the Board’s way. (No need to even fuss around telling the lower-caste members anything at all.)
This argument is self-serving and hollow, of course. Every offer is unique, and the full Board has the right to consider each offer separately and determine whether or not to suspend policy in each case. Furthermore, it is a basic infringement on the whole concept of representative government to deny the public’s representatives a voice in the deliberative process. Doing so, not only denies members of the representative body the right to express their viewpoints publicly and on the record, but it denies their constituents--the people who voted them into office to speak on their behalf--the right to have their viewpoints heard by the ruling majority and preserved as part of the lasting record.
The minority members made the argument that they just wanted a chance to ask Many Rivers some questions. They wanted to learn some specifics about the organization, such as what student demographic the school serves. They wanted to get a real sense of what threat--if any--the Montessori school poses to ISD 709’s enrollment. In a letter to the Board, the Many Rivers stated: “The substantial pre-K portion of our operation offers you no competition, and actually helps a number of children succeed in public school.”
By denying the minority Board members a chance to ask questions, the majority of our school board also denied the public of Duluth a full examination of fair market offers on long-vacant property, and possible relief for a school district suffering from deficits. They trashed Policy 203.5, which states: “Upon written request of three Board members… an item will be placed on the agenda…” (There’s no language saying the majority can rewrite the item,)  AND they discounted Policy 8070, which states: “Policies of the school board shall be subject to suspension…”

We do live in a democracy, don’t we?

One of the lessons of the current presidential race is that party politics and democracy seem to be increasingly divergent concepts. This divergence lies at the root of the problems in the boardroom of ISD 709.
The people who have ruled the boardroom for over a decade have demonstrated repeatedly that their loyalties lie somewhere other than with representative government. (This is the same group, incidentally--all DFL-endorsed members--that stole your vote and jammed the ill concieved, wildly optimistic Red Plan down our throats, who continue to hold secret, behind-closed-doors agenda meetings and have been wrong about nearly EVERYTHING.)
As long as you hold the power, I guess--like a King or a Queen--you don’t have to be right, and you don’t have to play fair.