In every levy election, there are “vote yes” campaigns and “vote no” campaigns. Unfortunately, an odious “vote no” organizer has resurfaced to run another Minnesota campaign.
Well-known levy buster Paul Dorr has served notice he will bring his campaign of disinformation to swiftboat the Robbinsdale Area School District’s levy attempt.
Dorr, an anti-abortion activist from Ocheyedan, Iowa, is well known in levy campaign circles. He has vowed to end public education using any means necessary. He claims to have organized the defeat of more than 20 levy elections in Iowa, South Dakota and Minnesota, including recent campaigns in the Lyle, Orono, Blooming Prairie and Howard Lake-Waverly districts. His smear campaigns include twisted facts and innuendo. When he leaves town, he leaves underfunded schools and a divided and bruised community.
Dorr validates my belief that that Tim Pawlenty should be focusing more on immigration…from Iowa. Its time to build a fence from Worthington to La Crescent.
[Sean Adds]Our friends at MN2020 were right to highlight this guy, another great piece on him and his wacky politics can be found in the City Pages,
Dorr believes that if most of the tax monies going to the state and federal governments for education were returned to the taxpayers, the cash flow would be so great that middle-class Christian families could operate their own schools and still have funds left over to help poor Christians to educate their children.
“I would love nothing more than to see a flourishing of private schools run by Protestants, Catholics, Unitarians, Jews, Quakers, Hmong, etc.,” Dorr says. “Let them teach the academics as well as their traditions and let them each provide for the poor in their neighborhoods/communities.” The picture Dorr seems to be laying out here is one of segregated schools, organized around traditions, values, and in many cases, race and ethnicity.
Dorr repeatedly talks about how public schools encourage a dependency on the bureaucracy and the welfare system by introducing students to sex and drugs. And he sees no value in compulsory education as a means to create a trained workforce and limit unemployment, poverty, criminality, and other social ills….
Secularists, he says, believe that “the triune God of the Bible has nothing to say about science, math, history, art, etc. There is no supernatural foundational purpose to learning…[public education] teaches self-esteem, self-image, self-awareness, self-actualization, self, self, self. True Christian schools teach Christ and Him glorified in all of your academic and social pursuits.”
Molacek, from South Tama, finds Dorr’s messianic stance amusing. “You know, he professes to be a Christian,” Molacek says. “I’m not sure Christ would come into a community and do what he does.”
Sad. My family went and worked in the Robbinsdale district. The district both needs the money and has the capacity to pay for it.
He got his ass handed to him in Lyle, MN. Don’t worry too much
My god… that in this day and age you’d see somebody who’d want a system like that.
Uh, since you are so concerned about what’s going on with school levies, where’s your “Rotten in Stillwater” post about the smear tactics going on in the Stillwater school district, where a pro-levy supporter, the “Stillwater infidel,” posted, among other things, information about anti-levy proponents’ children, such as their names, online?
wtm,
More info and links on that, please.
The Stillwater campaign is truly low (Stillwater — the home of Michelle B — seems to be trying to earn itself a reputation for unwholesome poitics). Leave the kids out of it.
Not to minimize what is happening by the St. Croix, but do you put lowball campaign tactics in the same class as trying to establish a theocratic/ethnically segregateed school syustem?
Here’s a link to the story in the Star Tribune about the “infidel”:
http://www.startribune.com/462/story/1453412.html
thanks, wtm
Mr. Dorr is not afraid of using his own children for his advantage in these levy campaigns. Several years ago in Wells — the United South Central School District — he used his kids as advertising props to try and convince voters that public schools were awful and icky places.
In the last couple of years, people have caught onto his act, but he still has a potent approach. Also, he does not come cheaply. Rumor has it that he demands an up-front fee of between $5,000 - $10,000 just to arrive and “help”.