It’s always nice to start with good news first, especially when the Duluth public school district is the subject. Director of Business Services, Bill Hanson, is projecting no cuts to education (no lost teachers or classes) in the upcoming fiscal year.

Now (you knew it was coming) for the district bad news. Very little actual improvement will be seen public school classrooms, in spite of a huge mother load of money pouring into district 709 over the past two years.

Since fiscal year ‘14, the district’s tax levy has risen $3.9 million, the State’s basic aid formula has gone up $183 per student (generating $1.6 million), a change in State funding for kindergarten freed up another $1.3 million, good old uncle State also indulgently treated the district to a $1.1 million annual grant of “matching” money and the Board stopped transferring $3 million out of the General Fund to finance the 2009a Red Plan bond. It all adds up to $10.9 million more money in the budget than the Board had two years ago, but the horn of plenty overflows even more! Throw in the $10 million lottery win from the sale of Central, and the upcoming year should be gonzo time for education! Our Board should have nearly $21 million more on its hands than it had two years ago.

City councilors would dance a jig for that!

Despite the big money flow, however, the district only plans to channel a nominal amount to actually benefit education. Mr. Hanson put it this way for the News Tribune: “It doesn’t mean that we can spend whatever we want, but it obviously gives us a little more comfort in considering things.”

Last year’s windfall resulted in an average drop of one student in high school class sizes. Will we now aim for a whopping two?

Besides the persistent black hole in the reserve fund/budget created by the Red Plan, two other financial issues explain why all the new money isn’t translating into real, dramatic improvements in the classrooms. One is an expenditure item: the employee pay raises approved last year by the Board. While the district used the suffering school children to tug at everyone’s heart strings, dissenters on the Board (and other interested parties) pointed out that a significant amount of the levy money would just end up in teachers’ and other employee’s wallets. (Contract talks were stalled until after the election was over and the levy secured.) Next year’s budget projects $1.8 million--the entire referendum increase approved by voters--swallowed up by salary increases and another $.8 million shuffled into severance pay for retirees.

A short chat with Ms. Burnham

I called the recently elected president of the Duluth Federation of Teachers, Bernie Burnham, to discuss some of the contract implications. She directed me in a clipped voice to call the Superintendent, then hung up.

I’d wanted to ask Ms. Burnham about one of the more interesting aspects of the teacher contract negotiations. Teachers assigned to the toughest district schools (mostly located on the west end of town), wanted to be rewarded with more pay. These schools have struggled academically since being built or remodeled under the Red Plan. A few have been designated as low-achievers by the State. After Ms. Burnham hung up on me, I called Board member Welty to get his take on the issue.

My interest had been spurred by another district brouhaha that’s received a fair amount of media attention within the past few weeks. Last month, a few dozen teachers from Denfeld High’s four core academic departments signed and sent letters to superintendent Gronseth and the school board. These teachers had a gripe. They didn’t like being forced to move students on to higher grade levels or to more advanced classes, despite failing marks, a practice sometimes referred to as “social promotion.” Denfeld High’s student body is largely comprised of kids from the struggling, low-achieving schools. Some kids are coming into the high school barely able to read.

I asked Board Member Welty whether or not he’d favored teachers getting more pay for teaching in those tougher schools.. Covering his chagrin with a chuckle, Welty replied that he wasn’t allowed input in the contract negotiations. He added, however, that he would have been disinclined to support the request. He said, “Everyone could make a case that something they’re doing deserves special consideration.”

Some things are special.

I asked Mr. Welty if some bonus pay may have helped even out the unjust inequities created by the Red Plan between the east and west end of Duluth. “Wouldn’t raises have been most beneficial in the schools that are struggling?” I asked, pointing out that money is a good moral booster, if nothing else. I also pointed out that the Board’s contract negotiator, Rosie Loeffler-Kemp, didn’t hold a tough line anywhere else. Increased pay in the more challenging schools was about the only demand the teachers were denied in the negotiations.

Member Welty considered my comments, then conceded: “I suppose an argument could have been made for hardship pay, like in the inner neighborhoods of big cities.”

“Hardship pay” is one way to put it.

A year and a half ago, as a school board candidate, I knocked on many doors across Piedmont Heights, and further west. The stories I heard were quite shocking. I couldn’t verify anything, of course, but the stories were repeated enough that I began to assume some truth to them. In one way, it doesn’t matter if they’re true or not. Schools are like a business in this way. If bad rumors start circulating about your business, it doesn’t matter how dazzling your building is. You’re going to lose customers.

I heard stories about teachers being screeched at and called all kinds of nasty things, including the “b” word. I heard stories about teachers being spit on and even punched. The worst stories came from the western middle school. Several people told me they would not, under any circumstance, send their kids into the school. They’d home school if necessary. While I was talking to one gentleman at his door, his daughter walked up to us with tears in her eyes. She started whimpering, “We’re moving, right daddy? I don’t want to go to that school. That’s a bad school.” The man looked at me with a chastened expression and said, “We’re in trouble if the kids are saying that, aren’t we?”

Trouble? That’s another way to put it.

While out on the campaign trail, I also ran into people employed in the western middle school. One guy called himself a member of the school’s “support staff.” He was big enough to be a bouncer in the toughest tavern in town. He said he spent all day walking around inside Lincoln Park middle school. He said, “You wouldn’t believe how many miles I put on and how many hiding places there are in that school.” His job was to roust kids out of those hiding spots, where he said they’re “blowing weed and doing whatever else they want.” He called the place “pure chaos.” He asked, “What are we supposed to do? Run a daily shuttle bus to Bethany (a juvenile crisis center)? Maybe we should.”

I ran into a teacher who had just retired from Lincoln Park. He said, “A bunch of kids are just running around in the halls. We can’t even get them into the classrooms. We need more alternative facilities. These kids just simply cannot be mainstreamed.” In another Piedmont Heights neighborhood, everyone I spoke to pointed at a house where no one was home. They all said, “A Lincoln Park teacher lives in that house. She’s got two middle-school aged kids of her own, and she won’t send them into the school. She’s putting her own kids on a bus to Proctor.”

Let me admit candidly that these comments really upset me. First and foremost, we should all worry about the kids that are causing trouble in Lincoln Park and some of these other schools. They’re likely on a fast track to criminality and prison. Their chance at life is being wasted, and some are going to cost us a bundle in terms of resources and the general well-being of our city. But we also should be upset about the disturbance their behavior is causing for the other kids trying to get an education.

This is not, however, just an education issue. We’ve also got a lot of money riding, here. I’ve had many conversations about the Red Plan. Only three or four people have told me they believe the Lincoln Park middle school was a great investment. Many feel placing a fifty million dollar copper-sided palace in that particular spot is one of the dumbest things they’ve ever seen.

Of course it’s too late to tear the palace down and recycle the copper. (The district generally waits at least twenty years, until the building is paid for, before scrapping it.) But something has to be done. Several schools with multi-million dollar price tags are not functioning on an acceptable level as educational facilities. Lincoln Park middle school funnels kids into Denfeld for their high school education. Denfeld teachers lamented in their protest letter: “We have many students that come to us in ninth grade without passing a class--not just science, but any class--since the sixth grade...We are at a loss as to how we can instill high school standards to students who enter high school operating at a fifth or sixth-grade level…We now have juniors in 10th grade English classes who cannot write a complete sentence.”

Yikes! Don’t need no high school. On to cowledge!

The primary selling point of the Red Mess was “equitable education” across the whole city. Would anyone seriously argue Denfeld High is now equitable with East? How did we ever get ourselves into anything so dumb? How is it possible that our Board ran up a bill of half a billion, with bond interest, and we’ve got public schools that are not competitive in the educational marketplace? Big Red was sold as forward-thinking, but in reality it was backward-looking. I argued until I was blue in the face that the template from 1898, the year Old Central was built, would not fit well on the oscillating world of today. Back then, terrazzo flooring made sense. It made sense to build buildings to last for centuries. It was a stable world and there were no other choices. You can’t just build whatever you want in a changeable world with online education and other viable options.

People don’t like big schools with big classes. They sure don’t want their kids dodging spit and hearing other kids screeching: “F…off, ya stupid b-!”

The word’s getting around, especially about some of the western schools. Magnified by a dysfunctional Board’s bad pr, a perception is solidifying in the community that these schools are unsafe and failing academically. Parents are exercising options and getting their kids out. The district lost another 55 students last month. This is on the heels of an 80 student drop the month before. We’re only in February, and a total of 182 more students have already disappeared from ISD 709 this year. Mr. Hanson is contending a large number of these students moved. He didn’t specify the percentage he’s claiming left the district and, as usual, didn’t reference any source of documented proof.

The constant erosion of ISD 709’s enrollment (and subsequent loss of state aid) is the other financial drain crippling the district’s ability to address its educational problems, despite all the funding increases. A 200 student loss last year translated into about $2 million in total lost State aid. The district has already lost nearly 200 more students this year.

Enrollment in ISD 709 has now dropped to 8,411. The mass exodus adds up to 2482 students (23%) lost since Mr. Dixon stepped into this town. Some time back, when the numbers started falling off a cliff, I wrote letters to the paper and called the television news stations. I became particularly alarmed in fiscal year ‘11. That year, open enrollment OUT of Duluth schools jumped to 627. The number of students coming IN was only 88. The net loss of 539 students was more than twice the number of students currently enrolled in Lakewood Elementary--in one year! The mainstream media finally became interested and ran a few stories. The people controlling the school board scoffed and told us not to worry. They assured us all the kids would come running back just as soon as the Red Plan’s fancy buildings were finished.  

Why is anybody still listening to these people?

Once a kid is settled in a school environment and is doing well, parents aren’t going to pull that kid out just because someone built a huge glittery building five miles away. It was delusional thinking. The premier prep school in the area--Marshall--is an old vocational school. A hoist still hangs from the ceiling of one of classrooms, from the days when the space was the auto shop. No one cares. The building is clean and safe. What parents care about is that there are fewer than twenty students in the classroom, and each kid is getting a lot of one-on-one help and a first rate education. People pay thousands to send their children to Marshall school, instead of going free to the public schools, because it offers what they really care about: a calm and nurturing educational environment.

NO KIDS ARE RUNNING AROUND DURING CLASSTIME. NO KIDS ARE SCREECHING THE “B” WORD.

Edison charter built a K-8 school for a fraction of the cost per square foot of the public schools and is now so popular it has a waiting list. (The school runs a lottery to get into kindergarten.) As soon as Edison’s new high school is completed, another six hundred or more students are going to disappear from ISD 709. Bill Hanson will tell us they left town. All the other educational venues--home schooling, online education, private schools--have been clobbering the public schools.

The Red Plan’s demographers proclaimed: “All evidence indicates traditional nonpublic schools will not contribute to the future decline of the Duluth public school district’s enrollment.” The Red Plan was colossal nonsense to its core, but it’s brick-and-mortar now, a fact, and we still owe $373 million for it.

A huge bet was laid down on our public education system, and we’ve been losing the game. How far will the bottom have to fall out, before the movers and shakers in this city get their hands off their butts and their heads out of the sand?

Loren Martell has been involved in Public School District issues for several years. He wrote the Red Plan report for the State Auditor’s Office and ran for the School Board office.