Our School Board, under the direction and guidance of Superintendent Keith Dixon, is managing the district like a dictatorship. It appears board members are taking a communistic approach to governing.
I remind all Duluthians that School Board Chairman Tim Grover is one of the original authors of the Plan B petition residents signed, demanding a vote. Yet Grover seems to be pretending that everything is fellow School Board member Gary Glass' idea and plan. Amazing how, once elected, Grover could flip his opinion and blame someone else.
Dixon and the board claim that Johnson Controls, as per their contract, would receive a fee of only 2 percent of the costs of red plan construction, about $5.86 million. Yet in a letter dated Dec. 6, 2006, from Johnson Controls to Kerry Leider, the school district's property and risk manager, Johnson Controls stated it could receive 18.8 percent of the construction costs as a management fee -- about $55 million.
Residents must be made aware of facts. When our majority-controlled School Board approved the red plan it also received approval from the Minnesota Department of Education to take as many as 564 homes at an estimated cost of $88 million to develop and implement the plan in compliance with state guidelines.
I'd ask which appears to be more trustworthy: the hearsay information disseminated by Duluth's Independent School District 709 administration and board or the factual School District documents. I choose the latter, and I believe Duluthians and the courts will, too.
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Arnold H. Glasow once stated: "One of the true tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency." Unfortunately, Dixon's emergency (the red plan) has become a disaster, and I hope he has the Federal Emergency Management Agency's phone number.
Don Kinsey
Duluth
The writer is a spokesman for the grass-roots group Restore Our Schools.
