Rural Range district closes schools, consolidates during troubling times

The St. Louis County Schools have approved a consolidation plan that will reshape this struggling rural district. A good start, but their money troubles won’t go away overnight. Also, this plan is subject to approval by the voters in a rural, parochial district that hasn’t been able to pass anything for more than a decade. We’ll hope for the best. Selfishly, I’m glad my alma mater at Cherry survived the cuts. (Stories from Mesabi Daily News, Duluth News Tribune).

In a nutshell the $78 million plan calls for the following:

  • Albrook and Cotton will be closed. A new school will be built out in the Finnish wonderland of the Brookston/Alborn/Meadowlands/Cotton metropolitan area. When I played t-ball in kindergarten all of these places had their own teams. I played for Forbes/Zim. Now most of those places don’t have enough kids. Cause, meet effect.
  • Cook and Orr will close. Declining enrollment is a problem here, too, but mostly these buildings are broken down. A new school will be built between these towns.
  • Cherry, Babbitt-Embarrass and Tower-Soudan will all be remodeled. Cherry will take in some former Cotton students on its southern front. Babbitt-Embarrass will become a high school and Tower-Soudan an elementary serving the vast northeastern portion of the district.

Comments

  1. There are two issues with the proposed changes and the vote for the bond issue, upcoming. First, there is the question of the buildings. Some people don’t want to lose a school in their community. Those people might vote no to the bond issue. They might vote “no” even if a brick falls off crumbling buildings on their way to the voting booth.

    The second issue is “education.” People who are out of the loop because they don’t have school age kids might not realize how much the programing and class selection in the schools has changed. The schools have so few kids that the district has eliminated programing, a number of classes that I consider essential, so basically only the basics are offered. [I must note that the district still DOES work with a couple of the Community Colleges to offer college credit classes.]

    But new buildings don’t necessarily mean a better educational program.

    The tax issue: The district people hope that residents will vote for the bond issue because the costs will be spread to recreational land owners. I’m not as optimistic about this. I have a sort of hobby of studying the plat book. There are A LOT of people that I know that own their home, but also own rural land or lake property. They may well vote against this. As my friend said, she is land rich and tax poor because of inheriting two properties.

    I plan to support the district’s decisions. I fear that the issues are so complicated that the bond issue will fail. The school board thinks that if the bond issue fails, we will be split among the high tax districts around us.

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