Bravo,

I want to commend you for looking at alternatives. Althiugh your plan may sound radical to some, any legitimate plan is worth investigating and yours certainly has merit in my estimation. I believe parents want their children to stay in the Duluth Public School system and comments about transferring kids outside of ISD709 are based more on frustration than reality. Most of us attended public schools, whether in Minnesota or elsewhere.

On a personal note. I grew up in a suburb in St Louis Mo. of about 40,000 people. At the time we had one high school and the average graduating class size was between 650 and 750, or about 8450 to 9750 for 13 grades during the mid 60's. The situation, the demographics and geography are differnt and my figures are a bit "soft" and this by no means makes me an expert. I am sure the post baby boomer decrease in attendance is evident there as well. In
fact, the figure has dropped to about 5100 for this school year, about 393 kids per class. BUT I feel I received an excellent education from the Public School system, one that was considerably more "crowded" at the time.

None-the-less, I feel it took a lot more "guts" on your part to suggest an alternative. Slowing down the decision-making process in order to look at alternatives such as yours is at the crux of the issue. It is always easy to subscribe to group think. Many of the biggest disasters in our history (Pay of Pigs for example) have been attributed in part to group think. Group think has also been found to be a factor in other historical disasters including Pearl Harbor and the Vietnam War. This is not that serious of course, but I applaud your efforts to be creative. I hope to see you this week at one of the meetings.

By the way, are you a Harry Truman fan, or did you just like the picture and the way it fit your campaign?

Regards