Let's compare plans for Duluth schools' future
As a member of MoveForwardDuluth, a grass-roots group created to support the Duluth school district's long-range facilities plan, I'm excited our community has gotten got a great assist -- and from an unlikely ally, too: Harry Welty and the Let Duluth Vote group, which organized in opposition to the red plan.
The long debate over whether Duluth's schools need a long-range facilities plan finally seems to be over. Both the school district and Let Duluth Vote now seem to agree Duluth needs to provide 21st-
century schools and education. Differences of opinion arise in the debate over how to get there.
One important question is whether Duluth has the students and resources to sustain three high schools and three middle schools. The board's plan is for two of each.
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With the state granting Welty and his colleagues the opportunity to submit their version of a facilities plan, Duluthians will soon be able to compare the benefits of two plans side by side. Once Let Duluth Vote develops its detailed plan, the Minnesota Department of Education will review it and provide its comments. If approved, citizens will be able to weigh the merits of Welty's plan against the already approved plan developed by the School Board after hundreds of meetings and a district-wide community survey.
Since Let Duluth Vote's recent actions are helping move Duluth forward, we at MoveForwardDuluth support Let Duluth Vote's efforts to develop a competing plan as quickly as possible. Congratulations to the School Board for its leadership the past two years, and thanks to Harry Welty and Let Duluth Vote for agreeing the time has come to close some schools and invest in significant upgrades to others. The question is whether the competing plan would work. The sooner it can be seen and studied the better for students.
Robin Downs
Duluth
The writer is a member of
MoveForwardDuluth
School Board makes decisions without facts
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Well, here we go again! School Board members have spoken with their usual lack of appreciation of the facts before them. This has been going on way back to the decision to replace Central High School with a new one (and now some want to sell it), when the original one was perfectly OK (and still is). Then all this business about the so-called red plan; this is just about the last straw!
They want to spend millions of dollars building new schools when remodeling the buildings might be fine -- and a lot cheaper. Who makes all these grandiose plans? We taxpayers are being used as an unlimited source of money for such ridiculous ideas.
Now here is another great idea: School Board members want to give the superintendant of schools another big increase in pay -- it doesn't matter whether he deserves it or not -- when the city is in desperate financial straits. Don't they know anything?
RALPH W. ANDRES
DULUTH
