I’m angry!

If I get elected to the Duluth School Board to save our schools, after eight years worth of well intentioned idiocy, it could be like winning a deck chair on the Titanic. Our schools are foundering and in one year, two at most, they will probably sink to the bottom of the Atlantic.

We’ve got high school classes with 50 students in them. For God’s sake when I was in high school and a teacher’s orders were obeyed like the word of God I never had more than 32 or 33 kids in my classes.

We have 1,800 children who have fled our schools since I began fighting the Red Plan and all its shiny new schools. Now the Edison School, one of the sanctuaries for our refugees, is about to start a new high school and suck another 600 secondary school students away. Secondary kids are a more important source of state tax money than elementary children. Our new ISD 709 schools will empty out like water from an open drain.

On top of the Red Plan exodus and a the threat of a new Edison high school we are about to lose two more legs from our school’s tottering financial table - legs that my old school board attached to keep our schools strong and solvent.

The first leg is a locally approved operational levy which first came into existence in 1993. That was the year I convinced Robert Mars to help win over skeptical Duluth voters to pass a local levy.

That levy was almost too good to be true but just like today it faced an angry distrustful public that agreed with Mark Twain when he said, “First God created idiots. That was for practice. Then he created School Boards.”  Thank God the voters weren’t idiots.

The 1993 levy got our school’s 3 million dollars from the state for 1 million in local dollars. That was sweet but it was even better than that. All we had to do was vote for one million to be raised from our property taxes.  Our School Board didn’t have to raise the local taxes. Just voting for them was all Minnesota required to keep the state’s three million. Is it any wonder I was able to persuade Bob Mars to change is opposition to a levy referendum?

I lost that, my third campaign for the School board, but my contribution allowed the School Board to build up a Second leg , a permanent reserve which allowed us to avoid borrowing money and even earn interest on money in the bank. We earned a million dollars of it yearly and it all went into the classroom. That reserve began to be spent down with the coming of Dr. Dixon and his Red Plan. Dixon’s School Board drew it down at a rate of three million a year for seven years. Imagine what will happen when its gone next year when we finally have to cut another $3 million from the budget.

If I get my sorry butt elected to the Board with 1. NO levy because the voters are furious and, 2. NO reserve fund and, 3. A new high school on the horizon - it will only be a matter of months before our District is bankrupt once again like it was in the early 1990’s. Now as then the State will take over our trashed schools and I’ll be as useful as one of the Titanic’s deck chairs lying in the muck under the Atlantic.

I love our schools. As a school board member I visited them every week and read to our children. I’m the product of a public school education. I wouldn’t volunteer to go back on this sinking ship if I didn’t think we could bring it safely into port.  But I can’t do it without plugging up the hole left by the Red Plan’s Ice berg.  I need air in the ship to keep it afloat and only the voters can blow it in when they go to the ballot box with their vote this November 5th.

I know how I feel about Mark Twain’s idiots who sailed into the iceberg putting our children at risk. I personally spent $20,000 trying to get the Board to change course only to see them speed the Titanic up by adding another $60 million dollars to the overall cost. They called that “compromise.” Now that the band is playing “Nearer My God to Thee” they’re out on the deck waving our children at me and expecting me to stop the tragedy. Damn them. They took half a billion dollars of mine without a vote, built fancy schools against my advice, only to see Duluth families leave in droves, and now they have the gall to tell me it will be my fault if we let our remaining children drown? Damn them again!

Here’s how I want you to look at it. I want you to go to the polls mad, just like me, but I want you to use your head not your betrayed heart. Letting the Titanic sink won’t spare us from repaying the half billion dollar bill to the banks. We’ll still be paying it only the Titanic will be sunk and our children drowned. I know that voting for a levy referendum seems like throwing good money after bad but its not. Its making sure that good money, half a billion dollars of our good money, isn’t wasted. Yes, our idiot School Board made us buy a white (Red) elephant but now we have to make sure it doesn’t starve to death. If that happens I’ll go down with the ship like a good captain but it will break my heart.

We owe it to ourselves to make the Red Plan work. We have to pass a levy. For most of us it will cost a couple hundred dollars a year. Wrong! see correction That’s a damned unfair, dirty deal after having our money and our votes stolen from us by the Red Planners.  But if we don’t pass the levy the Red Planners will have added one more injury to their insult. I’m too mad to let them get away with that. I won’t abandon our tiniest passengers because of an idiot School Board’s ignorance and vanity.  Stay mad with me but use your head. Don’t compound the foolish decisions of the School Board by making my terrible predictions come true. Save the Duluth Schools. Vote for the levy.

I left the School Board eight years ago when we had some of the smallest classrooms in the State of Minnesota and our students tested higher than the rest of the state. Help me bring that back.

Correction. This was a rough guess on my part which I did not check. It turns out that a home valued at a quarter million dollars will face about a sixty dollar tax increase. Most Duluth homes will face a lower property tax increase.
 

Harry Welty,
An idiot candidate running for the Duluth School Board

Order a lawnsign by calling Harry at 340-5197 Mail a Donation to: Welty for School Board PO Box 3434 Duluth, MN 55803