If you don't like my headline, get your own blog!
The DeLaSalle football field controversy has been best served without comment this long hot summer, lest a clumsy fellow like myself trip a political land mine. The opponents of the field, mostly Nicollet Island residents, grew more desperate with each passing day, improvising layers of bureaucracy and drafting into their league outsiders who imagined a disturbed archaeological significance on the order of the Taliban wrecking the statues of Buddha.
Yes, I suppose if you started a dig you might come up with some valuable wine bottles and beer cans. The guys my age who went to D had to thread their way through a hobo jungle.
All along the simple truth has been that the residents, led by Phyllis Kahn, don't want any kids on what they believe to be their private island on the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. Yes, this is the same Phyllis Kahn who champions children in her legislative career, except, apparently, diverse inner-city young people at a diverse, inner-city school that preceded the residents by approximately 100 years and has been promised a football field going on 30 years.
DeLaSalle has never had a home game on an island that only DeLaSalle has remained loyal to for more than 100 years. [snip] Pioneer Press
1 comment:
Your headline is fine. Have a ball with it. I live on Nicollet Island and, like many of my neighbors, have children. Mine go to public school and if that is not to your taste, so be it.
It's not a matter of keeping DeLaSalle out. The school is here. I just don't think anyone is automatically entitled to a public road and public parkland.
The only locked gates on the island are at the regulation-sized football field that the city let DeLaSalle High School build in 1984 over the sidewalk, boulevard and parking lane of a public road, Grove Street -- the same street the school now wants the city to turn over in its entirety.
Lots of people visit Nicollet Island. It's really the opposite of a gated community: it's a public park, part of a regional park that attracts more than one million people per year. Lots of those people use Grove Street too. DeLaSalle buses use it every day. So does my kids' school bus.
So say what you will. I'm sure you have reasons, if not facts, to believe that what you think is right.
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