Local View: Old schools good enough for housing but not for learning?

Let’s start at the beginning, as stories like this often should. The hospital where I was born? Completely gone. Demolished and hauled away, now just another empty lot waiting for its next act. The church where I was baptized? No longer a church. And the schools I attended: elementary, junior high, and high school? They’re still standing, or at least their footprints are, but they’re no longer schools. My elementary school was torn down and replaced. The others have been repurposed into housing.

And that, my friends, is the peculiar story of Duluth.

I’ve been scratching my head over this for some time. These old schools, replaced by shiny new buildings that cost the district upwards of half a billion dollars, are now apartments and condos. If they’re good enough for families to live in,