The Duluth Public Schools administration has a script, and it reads from it with practiced emotional urgency. Every few months, Independent School District 709 leadership takes to local airwaves, social media channels, and exclusive columns to announce that the sky is falling.

Facing yet another multi-million-dollar structural deficit, our elected officials frame their predicament as an act of God, presenting it as an unavoidable tragedy caused by stingy state aid formulas, historic inflation and rising insurance costs.

To solve this manufactured emergency, the school board passed Resolution B-8-26-4180 to place not one but two levy questions on the November ballot.

Question 1, “Protect Student Learning Today,” asks for a 10-year step-up operating levy costing about $8 a month on a $300,000 home.

Question 2, “Prepare for the Future,” asks for roughly $7 a month more on top of that — but only takes effect if Question 1 passes.

In other words, voters cannot simply reject the larger, longer-term ask while keeping the smaller one: a “no” on Question 2 does nothing unless it comes with a “no” on Question 1 as well.

Both levies rise every year with inflation for a decade! This is the choice actually in front of Duluth voters.

Ask the district how many millions of dollars Question 1 and Question 2 will actually raise, district-wide, each year — not per household, not per month, the real total — and you will not find an answer in their own Aug. 6 announcement.

That is not an accident. A board that wanted taxpayers to grasp the true scale of this ask would lead with that number, not bury it behind a monthly figure calibrated to sound like pocket change.
The administration’s public relations strategy relies on a severe ultimatum: vote to tax yourselves more, or watch us gut your children’s schools.

It is a powerful piece of emotional theater. It is also deceptive.

What Duluth taxpayers are currently witnessing looks like a textbook case of the “Washington Monument Syndrome.” This is when a public agency faces a budget shortfall.

Instead of quietly absorbing cuts within its massive administrative overhead, the agency intentionally makes cuts to its most visible, deeply valued services: in this case, classroom teachers, sports and elementary school funding.

By parading the elimination of 48 teachers and support staff positions and implementing rigid cuts to school site budgets, the board is deliberately maximizing public panic.

It is holding our children’s classrooms hostage to force a fatigued tax base into forgiving decades of real estate maneuvering, structural mismanagement and executive excess.

To understand how we arrived at this structural cliff (again), we have to look past the emotional rhetoric and audit the numbers.

The narrative that Duluth Public Schools is being starved for cash collapses when we analyze the district’s record of self-inflicted real estate failures, protectionist policies and, most of all, its refusal to ever actually pay down the debt that is driving this crisis.

Look no further than the fate of the 1971 hilltop Central High School campus. In 2016, facing an active budget deficit, the school board received a massive $14.2 million offer from Duluth Edison Charter Schools to buy the property.

Rather than face effective competition, the board invoked protectionist policies to reject the offer. It sat on the vacant property for years and ultimately liquidated it to a private developer in 2022 for just $8 million. 

Even accounting for six years of carrying and maintenance costs in between, the board left millions of dollars of potential funding on the table — money it arguably had a responsibility to pursue to mitigate the financing costs of its earlier mistakes.

The board’s appetite for real estate misadventure didn’t end there. It went shopping for corporate real estate downtown, purchasing the vacant Duluth News Tribune building in 2023 for a modest-sounding $600,000. But the bargain ended there: the board has since authorized a staggering $16 million to $17 million renovation to transform it into a glossy new central administrative headquarters.

Just one year ago, in October 2025, the board bypassed us voters entirely to unilaterally approve $38 million in general obligation bonds for “long-term facilities maintenance,” strategically deferring the principal repayments to mask the immediate tax impact.

With interest factored in, that single unilateral decision saddles Duluth taxpayers with a $50.8 million repayment obligation running through 2034.

If you are wondering why the board did this behind your back, and hid its costs, simply ask whether you would have voted for it.

And if you are wondering why the board is still coming to us for millions more, on top of that, less than 12 months later, read on.

If the $38 million maintenance bond sounds like like déjà vu, that’s because it is.

This board, and the boards before it, have made an art form of refinancing and restructuring Red Plan debt rather than ever actually retiring it, and each round of “relief” has followed the same pattern: extend the bond, defer the principal and call it savings.

We are all tired of hearing about the Red Plan, but most of us have no been told that we are still paying for it.

In 2015, the board refinanced a chunk of the original Red Plan bonds, a move that saved taxpayers a few million dollars over several years but left the underlying debt intact.

In 2019, the board went further, voting to restructure one of the remaining bonds by extending its life by several years specifically to free up cash in the general fund in the short term, at the cost of more than a million dollars in additional long-term interest. That is the definition of borrowing against the district’s own future to paper over its present.

The result is a debt load that dwarfs anything comparable districts carry. Duluth Public Schools reports a debt service fund of at least $27 million. Out of a total district-wide budget of $175 million, that is nearly 16% of the budget going just to service debt.

That is a shocking number compared to neighboring school districts with less than half of that percentage devoted to debt servicing.

With refinancing and accumulated interest, the total cost of the Red Plan is on pace to exceed half a billion dollars before the last bonds are retired in the early 2030s.

But the situation is even worse than this.

Neither state nor federal governments will give the board any money to compensate for its financial shenanigans, so almost every penny of that debt servicing money is coming out of our own local tax levy.

In 2025, our levy totaled almost $45 million. The $27 million debt service expense amounts to 60% of that. This means that, for every dollar we give to this school board, only 40 cents goes to anything other than servicing that debt

Compare that to our neighbors, none of whom followed Duluth into this hole. Hermantown built and expanded its facilities and still fields competitive programs on a total budget less than $50 million, without repeated refinancing gymnastics.

Cloquet built an entire new high school for about $57 million, less than a fifth of what Duluth borrowed, without straining its operating budget.

Proctor’s entire bond package came in at less than $50 million.

These districts made real estate decisions appropriate to what they could actually afford and then paid for them.

Duluth built a $315 million plan it could never afford and has spent nearly two decades refinancing its mistake over and over (like paying one credit card with another) instead of correcting it.

While facilities bleed the district dry, executive compensation remains completely insulated from the financial pain imposed on classrooms.

Amid the district’s consecutive years of multi-million-dollar general fund deficits, the school board approved a staggering 12.15 percent salary raise for its superintendent, elevating the base contract to $240,000 per year (never mind a benefits package that you and I can only dream of).

That translates to a $20,000-per-month pay rate funded directly by the local tax base. For context, Amy Klobuchar earns a base salary of $174,000 a year as a U.S. Senator: a raise of 0% from last year.

To compound these structural real estate failures, the district’s current operational shortfall is also the direct consequence of an irresponsible (to put it politely) reliance on temporary federal pandemic funding.

In the business world, using a one-time emergency injection of capital to launch permanent, high-overhead operational programs would probably be grounds for immediate termination.

Through the COVID years, Duluth Public Schools took in a massive $35.8 million in temporary federal ESSER cash. Rather than restricting these funds to short-term emergency mitigation, the board aggressively expanded its ongoing footprint.

The most egregious example was the rapid deployment of a massive technology program, using federal emergency dollars to purchase more than 8,000 student learning devices.

Any competent manager knows that hardware carries an expensive tail of recurring software licenses, specialized tech-support staff, cybersecurity protocols and inevitable replacement cycles. Yet the board effectively institutionalized a permanent and recurring annual technology liability (reported by technology director Greg Krueger to be $4 million) without securing a permanent funding source to pay for it and without consulting us taxpayers at all.

When the federal emergency cushion predictably expired (as it should) our federal aid plummeted by 47 percent, driving the district straight off an entirely predictable fiscal cliff.

When voters rejected a levy aimed at cleaning up this mess in May 2024, the board retaliated by pulling funding directly out of neighborhood classrooms: threatening dozens of teaching positions while protecting its lush administrative overhead.

This is the piece missing from every one of the board’s referendum pitches: the “unavoidable” deficit is not primarily a story about state aid formulas or inflation or insurance. It is a story about a district that borrowed far beyond its means, went shopping for real estate it didn’t need and protected its own compensation.

Instead of confronting any of it honestly, it repeatedly restructured its debt to buy short-term political cover, pushing the true cost onto future taxpayers and future school boards.

Every dollar spent extending Red Plan bonds is a dollar unavailable for classrooms today, and asking voters to approve a new operating levy without reckoning with that debt-servicing burden is asking us to subsidize kicking the can down the road; not to help the kids, as the board would have us believe.

Taxpayers are now being asked to subsidize a manufactured crisis born of administrative incompetence and, above all, a debt-servicing habit no peer district has been subject to.

A responsible organization would have exhausted its own corporate real estate portfolio, put a stop to serial refinancing and perhaps sold some property (or at least stopped borrowing millions to buy more) before asking struggling Duluth families for a tax hike and hiding the dollar amount of that ask behind “per month” estimates that it itself produced

While it is important to support public education, taxpayers must stop rewarding structural incompetence.

The school board wants you to believe that voting “No” is an attack on children. The truth is exactly the opposite. Voting “No” is the only mechanism Duluth families have left to force this administration to stop funding administrative monuments, halt real estate speculation, retire its debt honestly instead of secretly refinancing it into the next decade and finally prioritize the classroom over the boardroom.

This is Washington Monument Syndrome, playing out in Duluth, on our tax bill. It is time to reject the emotional theater, see past the manufactured panic and vote NO on both referendum questions.

Rejecting them will likely force the district into “Statutory Operating Debt,” which under Minnesota law triggers state oversight of its financial operations by the Minnesota Department of Education.

That is precisely what we need, and what is appropriate. It is time to let the state step in, look at the books and find out exactly what is going on with our tax dollars.

Jim Lyttle is a retired college teacher and an occasional Community Education instructor for Duluth Public Schools.