News & Articles

If you voted November 7^th, please disregard this tongue-lashing. My God, Duluth, what is the matter with you? It was a sunny day, the roads were perfectly clear, polling places are conveniently located throughout the city. Participating in your democracy requires such a minimal effort. How could only 16,878 of 57,904 registered voters (including townships)--a lousy 28.84%-have shown up to VOTE? 

And that’s registered voters. How many more are eligible, who aren’t registered? 
The DFL is parading around, crowing about its big victory. A victory based on a 28% turnout is a mandate? Here’s the reality: the political machine has disenfranchised the public to such a degree only their little power clique shows up at the polls anymore. This election does not represent a true majority: it is only the majority of a very tiny minority. 

When I was knocking on doors on behalf of the non-DFL-endorsed outlier candidates, one woman told me: “I don’t vote!” When I asked her why, she answered: “Because it’s all rigged; it’s a sham. The whole thing is rotten to the core. We have to learn to survive on our own and wait for the system to come down, so we can rebuild it new.” I answered, “The flaw in your reasoning is that, in the meantime, you’re creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. By not voting, you’re letting the rigged system rule; you’re handing the machine candidates the power to raise your taxes and run the show.” 

The fact is: if you don’t vote, you get the government you deserve. 
I’ve been asked a few times if I’m going to cover the new school board, starting in January. It’s quite time-consuming to sit through meetings and then listen to them again, trying to get accurate quotes from DFL verbal contortionists like Annie Harala and Judy Seliga-Punyko. I’ve already wasted quite a bit of time on Josh Gorham and Sally Trnka. Transcribing the Chamber of Commerce forum, I spent at least 20 minutes playing and replaying one of Mr. Gorham’s responses. I kept wondering: did he really say we’ve “rolled the candlestick” too far down the road? His microphone didn’t pick up his voice well and it was such an odd expression I couldn’t be sure. By the time I was reasonably convinced I had it right, I was so inspired by the originality of young Mr. Gorham’s image, I wrote a little ditty, based on Bob Dylan’s classic: Like a Rolling Stone. 

Please bear with me, readers. “Stick” is a pretty tough word to rhyme in any profound way: 
I’m feeling kind of sick, 
they keep laying it on so thick,
I’ve heard too much political shtick,
my brain’s become a burnt-out wick--
just like a rolling candlestick! 
Sorry, Bob! Fortunately, you escaped Duluth before you were old enough to comprehend a school board election. 
Young Mr. Gorham has been declaring over and over that he is our “servant leader,” exactly what Keith Dixon used to call himself. God save us from our Servant Leaders! 
Mr. Gorham’s DFL-endorsed ally, Sally Trnka, has also been repeating the same phrases over and over. Her campaign left me curious about the social determinant that sent Sally down a life path where she constantly and crisply rattles off the phrase, “social determinant,” as though the words encapsulate all the problems and solutions in the world. 

The Duluth News Tribune happily declared: “’Positive’ wins in Duluth school board election(!)” after the results were revealed. According to our paper of record, the winners of this election didn’t spend their campaigns “dwelling on the district’s problems.” Those nasty, nay-saying losers, on the other hand, the Trib informed us, shamefully “focused mostly on the district’s issues with transparency and trust, money and school inequities.”

Thank God the people discussing the real issues lost and Pollyanna won! When do we start painting rainbows in the boardroom? 
Rosie Loeffler-Kemp, the most adept political machine candidate I’ve ever seen, publicly crowed in the same article that now-with her and her DFL pals running the show--we’re finally going to have “a functional Board.” I beg to differ with the face of the party machine. What we’re really set up for now, Duluth, is a chattering, cheerleader booster club eager to put the “fun” back in dysfunctional. 

 
Poor Alanna Oswald. 

You’ll have to forgive my lack of faith, but I’ve watched the DFL dominate in the boardroom for many years. We’re destined to hear a lot about “social determinants” and how we can only save public education by solving poverty and all the other social obstructions to good learning. We’re going to hear a lot of “big ideas,” rather than dealing with all those nasty, negative, real things, like the budget. 

Any budget idea generated by this group will likely resemble Annie Harala’s scheme to send buses down to Cloquet and up to Knife River and everywhere else under the sun, in a harebrained attempt to find some urchins along the road and haul them back to boost Duluth’s enrollment. The Superintendent recently admitted Annie’s quixotic mission was another predictable waste of money that “only yielded a handful of students.” 

There will be a huge blitz of spin, such as the district’s gaudy “annual report” event just held at Lincoln Park school. Ultimately, however, the shared brain of the Board’s majority will only conjure up one solution for dealing with the district’s crippled budget: hammering the taxpayers. You are going to get hammered, and hammered some more Duluth, as the Positive Posse throws more of your tax dollars at this mess that they, as a group, are responsible for. Every bad fiscal decision made in the boardroom over the past decade has been DFL rubberstamped and approved. 

Any mention of their multiple mistakes will be off-limits now, but I hope the DFLers are finally held accountable if their orgy of happy-talk fails to turn the mess they’ve made around. They’ll try to point fingers, as they always have--at the State, at Special Education, at the Charter Schools, at the boogey man and all the naysayers, but they should not be allowed to scapegoat any longer. 

The biased establishment of Duluth will fail to toughly critique their performance, but if the DFL’s cheerful chatter fails to produce “positive” results, I hope the public finally assigns all blame where it appropriately belongs. 
Poor Alanna Oswald will now be the sole dissenting voice left in the boardroom. Commenting on her fate in his blog, Board member Welty described Alanna as “a lone voice of reason doomed to be ignored.” Board member Oswald will soon be surrounded by the Positive Posse. At least she’ll stay warm this winter, especially if she gets a seat close to Loeffler-Kemp. Hot air will surely warm up the room, as the positive ones start putting on their monthly promotional exhibits in front of the camera. 

Though clearly loyal to the DFL Club, Nora Sandstad is the one (and only) DFL-endorsed Board member who has demonstrated some capacity for independent thinking. Starting in January of next year, lonely Alanna will find herself broiling in (at best) a 5½-to-one Happy-Talk Hell.

Actually, make that 6½-to-one. 

“My honest opinion of the Superintendent,” Harry Welty once posted in his blog, “is that he has considerable talent for knowing how the district ought to operate. However, he plays favorites and that is a destructive method of operating. As for the Board, he told me early on what his attitude towards it was: he views it as his job to protect the schools from Board members. “

If what Mr. Welty reported is true, and Duluth’s public schools’ Superintendent actually declared that his job was to protect the schools from elected Board members, he is lucky I never made it onto the school board. I would have regarded this regal bureaucratic disdain for representative democracy as tantamount to insubordination, and grounds for firing him. 

In a recent Board email, member Oswald stated more truth about the boardroom’s personal dynamics: “Our school board is a very divided group of two ‘sides,’ and not everyone is treated equally. Our Superintendent does not operate with full transparency to all Board members or the community.” 
When it comes to the Board’s interpersonal relations, Bill Gronseth has conducted himself in a very biased and unfair manner. The most pronounced nod of agreement I received when I spoke, as a candidate, to the News Tribune’s editorial board came when I said: “My biggest criticism of Mr. Gronseth’s job performance is that he has completely failed to heal the divide in the boardroom and in the city.” 

The fact that some members of the paper’s editorial board not only nodded vigorously, but verbally agreed with an emphatic, “Yes!” to this statement was quite notable. Obviously our paper’s editorial page is not known for admitting anything negative regarding our public school district. 
Bill Gronseth was a true believer in Dixon’s flimflam from the onset. As the cotton top hustler’s underling, he assured us there was no need to worry that a huge investment was actually driving families away. “Many families have said once the new schools open,” Mr. G. cooed to us, “they will be back.” After following his master’s footsteps to the top of the ladder, he further declared: “We’ve laid a firm foundation for this community….“It (the Red Plan) has given us a brighter future…It gives our community a great future.” 

As Dixon’s right-hand man, Mr. G. praised the opening of the one of the newly renovated schools this way in a News Tribune op-ed piece: “I was greeting people in the hallways with Dr. Dixon. I watched as everyone explored with wide-eyed excitement. I could tell from the comments of parents and kids that all agreed the building was beautiful…The Duluth school board deserves thanks for everything that has happened…They had a plan and they saw it through. They showed they care about all students. May they keep up their good work.”

I believe this witness is biased, your honor. 
“I know it isn’t all sunshine and rainbows.” Mr. G. recently admitted to the paper of record. “We have some big issues to tackle…(But) we need to have people who are focused on problem-solving, on lifting up what is going right, so we can do more of it, and less negativity, finger-pointing and shaming.” By the time the G-man preached his positivity gospel to all of us, things had reeled nearly out of control in Duluth, largely because he and his DFL-endorsed Board allies had engaged in some pretty aggressive finger-pointing and shaming of their own. 

Over the years, Billy G. has been quite vocal about the naysayers who’ve been unwilling to march along with him and Keith Dixon and their Board allies. “When I think about what Duluth needs,” he ruminated in the News Tribune, “I want to say more forward-looking people. I don’t know if that’s the right way to put it, but it seems whenever Duluth tries to better the city, it is faced with lots of opposition. The people who oppose the progress aren’t necessarily the biggest stakeholders, they just tend to have the loudest voices. It just sometimes seems like people are missing the whole picture--like it has to be this way because that’s the way it’s always been, but it’s not necessarily the best way for it to be now.” 

Let me play (quite appropriately in this context) devil’s advocate: “When I think about what Duluth needs, I want to say more savvy-thinking people. I don’t know if that’s the right way to put it, but it seems whenever the bigwigs say they’re going to better the city, any feedback from the plebeians is faced with lots of opposition. The people who are jamming ‘progress’ down the public’s throats are often the biggest stakeholders with vested interests, and definitely tend to have the loudest voices. It just seems like the leaders are missing the whole picture--like we have to have this our way because we have all the power and that’s the way it’s always been, even if what we want isn’t necessarily the best way for the city to go, now, or ever.” 

 
The hidden player in this power drama.

A lot of people have asked me where the DFLers got all their money, to run advertising everywhere--on billboards and on the radio. I wish we had a media watchdog in this town capable of doing anything beyond just going through all the rote motions. I would like to know how much money came from the unions and how much of that came from outside of Duluth. 

School Board races are supposed to be nonpartisan, but the races are very politically rigged, and are increasingly being influenced by outside players. Consider this quote from Education Minnesota (the umbrella organization of the two powerful teacher unions, the NEA and the AFT) in its 2016/17 newsletter: “After a few tough roads of negotiations, the Fergus Falls Minnesota Education Association knew they wanted help to get new school board members elected. This past year, the union formed a committee and did just that. ‘We had a lot more success than we thought,’ said Randy Hanson, a social science teacher who ran the committee. ‘We needed a better relationship with our Board, (by taking it over.)’ Fergus Falls was one of many locals (local unions) who got involved with their local school board or levy elections in 2016.” 

The newsletter goes on to brag: “With the help of Education Minnesota, both for resources and financial support, many local unions saw successes. In Fergus Falls, the committee sought out potential members and eight people ran for three seats.” The union managed to get “two new faces on the school board,” and “there will be another election in two years…and they are ready to go to work.” 

Touting this pattern of outside union organizers pouring resources into local school board elections, Education Minnesota bragged in the same article that it found “more success” in Willmar, Minnesota…” In 2016, “Education Minnesota-Willmar…saw the opportunity to fill (its) open (Board) seats with education-friendly leaders who share (its) values. They saw three out of four seats go to their endorsed candidates…The Willmar local union was also able to tap into other resources--other labor unions. Education Minnesota’s statewide affiliation with AFL-CIO Area Labor Councils provides Education Minnesota local unions another resource to help pass (win) local elections…”

Certain candidates flush with enough money to buy billboard and radio ads, while some of their challengers were forced to order lawn signs on credit cards feels like anything but real democracy. The political landscape, especially around the school district, has become very tilted in this town. A 28% General Election turnout is much more suggestive of a broken system than a big victory for the DFL Positivity Posse--also known as Bill’s Booster Club.

On the upside, Mr. G. might finally stop trying to run away now.