Of course Perry Groten would cover this event: the City of Sioux Falls now honors a vote-fraudster and Republican crony capitalist turned flag-insulting socialist sympathizer with a larger-than life statue in Falls Park.

The 900-pound, ten-foot bronze statue of R.F. Pettigrew will gaze upon visitors who enter the park, while staying true to the artistic vision Darwin Wolf had nearly a decade ago.

"My biggest fear was that it wouldn't be good enough for what it was intended to do, the agony and the ecstasy," Wolf said [Perry Groten, "Pettigrew Statue Dedicated at Falls Park," KELOLand.com, 2013.05.17].

I'd like to organize some pranksters to go through the agony and ecstasy of swiping the Pettigrew statue and hauling it across town to go toe to bronze toe with plutocrat T. Denny Sanford.

Making one of Lenin's favorite writers the sentinel of Falls Park is a fine flip of the bird to the city that scorned this changed man a century ago:

The statue is holding a piece of paper symbolizing Pettigrew's request to the city years ago not to develop this area.

"And the City blew him off and developed it and a hundred years later, we spend millions of dollars to do what he told us in the first place, so that's why that piece had to be here with that letter," Wolf said [Groten, 2013.05.17].

The contents of Pettigrew's letter to the city calling for the preservation of Falls Park might make a nice inscription at the base of his new statue. But so would any number of excerpts from his 1922 book Triumphant Plutocracy, such as...

I believe the new century will open with many bloody revolutions as a result of the protest of the masses against the tyranny and oppression of the wealth of the world in the hands of a few, resulting in great progress toward socialism and the more equitable distribution of the products of human toil and, as a result, the moral and spiritual uplifting of the race [R.F. Pettigrew, letter to Clara Barton, 1900.11.22, quoted in Triumphant Plutocracy].

Let those words be a starting point for debate at the next Tea Party rally in Falls Park.

One more encouragement for brains to drain from rural South Dakota to the bright lights of the big city: Sioux Falls teachers just won a five-year working agreement that giveth back what Governor Daugaard tooketh away:

Sioux Falls teachers voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to approve a new, five-year working agreement that will raise their pay by 8.54 percent next school year.

The new contract turns the clock back on a severe state funding cut in 2011 that lowered their salaries an average of 2.05 percent. Next year, teachers will make what they would have been paid had they received 1 percent increases each of the past three years.

The school district can afford the pay hike because it has spent less than it planned to for years and has an oversized reserve fund. Their 2013-14 budget alone looks to spend $6.6 million of their $22 million in general fund reserves [Josh Verges, "Sioux Falls Teacher Pay up 8.5%," that Sioux Falls paper, 2013.04.18].

Sioux Falls teachers' lead negotiator Travis Dahle (no wonder they win!) says the 96% yea vote from participating education association members shows the deal is good. But check the nuts and bolts: while their base pay rises from $30,680 to $33,299, their work week increases from 37.5 hours to 40 hours. That's mostly planning time, which means that for most teachers, nothing changes: this new contract simply counts hours that they're already putting in at their kitchen table looking up classroom resources, planning lessons, and grading papers.

But looking strictly at the numbers, the 8.54% pay increase corresponds with a 6.67% work increase. Break it down hourly (assume 184 days/36.8 workweeks), and the base teacher pay goes from $22.23 per hour to $22.62, an increase of 1.75%.

I welcome rural professional colleagues to compare their upcoming raises. I'd compare the Sioux Falls deal with the contract Spearfish has offered its teachers for the coming year... but the contracts handed out this month have blanks on them. Once again, the Spearfish School Board expects its staff to sign contracts before negotiations have determined salaries. (Fun legal question: if a teacher signs such a contract, but then quits when the salary written in afterward turns out to be unsatisfactory, can the school still penalize the teacher for breach of contract?)

The Sioux Falls school district just made a slam-dunk tech decision. They will outfit 17,500 grade 3-12 students with Google Chromebooks. These bare-bones laptops run nothing but 'Net. Communicate with webmail, create and collaborate on documents on Google Docs or another cloud app... what else do students need? Sioux Falls will spend $4.4 million to acquire the machines, which comes out to a right-on-retail $251 per machine. That's a fifth of what other schools have historically spent per Gateway machine or swivel-top Tablet HP. Those huge savings are more than enough to cover the remaining costs of outfitting the K-2 kids with iPads... and we haven't included the savings that the district will enjoy from dropping the costly license contracts for all the software that it cannot and need not install on the Chromebooks.

Enter the state Department of Education to throw a monkey wrench in this smart tech move. Next year, in the final year of the Dakota STEP test, DoE is moving the test online. DoE is now telling Sioux Falls that it can't use its Chromebooks and iPads for the Dakota STEP. Those devices will be fine for the new online tests we get on 2015, but the Pearson corporation that makes our current statewide standardized test says it just can't make the Dakota STEP work on Sioux Falls's chosen technology:

[Education Secretary Melody] Schopp said there are doubts about the ability to lock down the testing window on Chromebooks so that students could not access other applications. And the iPad has a smaller screen than a standard desktop or laptop computer, so the questions might not be displayed in the same way.

Schopp said there is no chance Pearson will address those concerns in time for the 2014 tests, and the Department of Education hasn’t yet decided what to do about it [Josh Verges, "Students Can't Use New Computers for 2014 Tests," that Sioux Falls paper, 2013.04.01].

Horsehockey. Pearson, you have 12 months, You have our money and lots of experts. You can figure this out. The display issues are trivial and fixable with probably four lines of CSS code. The security issues are also malarkey: a little configuring on the testing end, a little filter/firewall action on the school end, and your concerns that kids will cheat on this meaningless (for them) test disappear. The notion that the state Department of Education and an education testing mega-corporation can't solve a simple tech problem that's been addressed by numerous other organizations suggests obstinance or incompetence in both offices.

Secretary Schopp at least has the good sense to say that testing is secondary to district efforts to improve instructional tools. And since tools are secondary to actual instruction, that makes testing tertiary at best, right?

Sioux Falls and Rapid City continue to chug along in population growth. New Census estimates show the Sioux Falls metro area (Minnehaha, Lincoln, Turner, and McCook counties) at 237,251 residents. As of 2012, the Rapid City metro area (Pennington and Meade counties) has 138,738 residents. That's 28.5% and 16.6%, respectively, of South Dakota's estimated 833,354 population... or 9 out of 20 South Dakotans living in those two metro hubs. Reach just a little further to include counties closely linked to those metros (Lake and Moody to Sioux Falls; Lawrence to Rapid City), and you likely get an even 50% of South Dakotans whose lives revolve quite significantly around those two major hubs.

The Governing analysis finds 135 metros out of 381 surveyed seeing more population growth from international immigrants than from domestic migration and births outpacing deaths. But Sioux Falls and Rapid City are still growing their own, and lots of them. Over just the last two years, the Census estimates that Sioux Falls saw 7,889 more residents come from in-country migration and births outpacing deaths and 1,067 immigrants from overseas. Rapid City saw 3,866 in domestic and natural growth and 294 in overseas immigrants.

On both counts, Sioux Falls is drawing immigrants foreign and domestic at a slightly higher rate than Rapid City, suggesting that diverse job opportunities trump Black Hills recreation in economic development.

Hey, Mayor Huether! I know you're excited about the prospect of doubling Sioux Falls's Walmart count. Not everyone in Sioux Falls is as thrilled.

But let's look at this from a city planning perspective. If you're going to add grocery stores (and these Walmarts will come with grocery sections, right?), you should encourage them to go where need exists for more access to groceries. And according to the USDA's new Food Access Research Atlas, the two new Walmarts will plunk down neatly outside the areas where Sioux Falls could most use some neighborhood grocery stores:

Folks in north central, west central, and south central Sioux Falls live in what the USDA calls "food deserts," which in urban areas means places where a significant percentage of residents live more than a mile (reasonable walking distance?) from a grocery store. These two new Walmarts on the edges of the city do little to ease the pressure on folks in these areas trying to feed their families without having to drive all over kingdom come. These two new Walmarts will also make it even harder for these food-desert neighborhoods to support local grocery options.

I understand the logic in locating a big box store out on undeveloped land with plenty of room for parking and trucks and access from big roads. But if City Hall is interested in boosting economic development with Walmarts on the city edges, it should also be looking for solutions for the food needs of these existing neighborhoods.

By the way, Sioux Falls anti-Walmart petitioneers point out that Vermont has four Walmarts for its 626,000 people. Cities with no Walmarts: Boston, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Detroit... four out of five of which are pretty happening places.

I don't make this stuff up; I just report it.

Landscape architecture firm Confluence is hosting a prostate cancer fundraiser at its Sioux Falls office in conjunction with National Corn Dog Day next Saturday, March 23. Proceeds go to the Avera McKennan Foundation.

You can head over to Confluence's office at 524 North Main next Saturday. You can enjoy the corn dogs and give money for a good cause. But remember: participating means you're not a real South Dakotan.

Mike Huether's history in Premier Bankcard usury is enough to induce me to vote for any Democrat who challenges him in a primary for whatever higher office Huether may seek.

But Joel Rosenthal catches another quote from the mayor of Sioux Falls that won't help him win votes from any party. Yesterday, Mayor Huether seemed to claim credit for getting Walmart to propose two new stores for Sioux Falls:

Huether said residents told him they needed more retail when he campaigned for office three years ago.

“I was committed to seeing what I could do. Thank goodness I was elected mayor,” he said. “North side, we’re getting a grocery store. North side, we’re getting retail” [Jodi Schwan and Beth Wischmeyer, "Two Walmarts Planned for Edges of Sioux Falls," that Sioux Falls paper, 2013.03.12].

At least Mayor Huether had the decency to thank the secular goodness instead of any particular God.

Rosenthal recommends Mayor Huether ease back on the "chutzpah":

I have been active in politics at the local, state, and national levels for 36 years, interested in politics and reading about politics for now about 50 years and do not recall any politician talking about himself in such a way.

...Sometimes I agree with Mike Huether, sometimes I disagree, and I have worked with him on Library issues. He is a man of energy and he is possessed but I suggest he modulate his self assuredness [Joel Rosenthal, "Chutzpah," South Dakota Straight Talk, 2013.03.12].

Running for office requires a certain amount of self-confidence. But Mayor Huether, the trick is not to tell us about it.

Four Legislators listened to teachers yesterday, and four was enough. Senator Al Novstrup brought his loathing of public school teachers to Senate Education yesterday in the form of Senate Bill 187, his proposal to end the due process right of continuing contract for all teachers in South Dakota. Novstrup's was another GOP local-control sham. SB 187 wouldn't put Novstrup's fingerprints on the gun; it would simply hand the gun to local school boards and let them opt out of continuing contract. Given that the powerful Sioux Falls School Board wouldn't oppose this bad bill, teachers everywhere should fear for their due process rights.

Senator Novstrup's bill has nothing to do with improving education; if anything, continuing contract produces correlates with better educational outcomes. SB 187 comes from ideology, not practical ideas for helping teachers help your kids learn more.

Fortunately, Senator Novstrup found himself alone at the mic yesterday to promote his bad idea. SDEA sent a rep to Senate Education testify against SB 187. Watertown teacher Steve O'Brien came to explain the importance of continuing contract. Two teachers-turned-legislators, Rep. Paula Hawks and Sen. Chuck Welke, took time out of their busy legislative schedules to urge their colleagues to vote this bill down.

The bad news is that, with every educator's voice in the room saying, "Don't do it!" three Republican senators (Ryan Maher, Tim Rave, and Phil Jensen) still ignored the experts and voted to do it. The good news is that, this time, good sense had them outnumbered. Three other Republicans (Deb Soholt, Bruce Rampleberg, and J. Mark Johnston) joined one Democrat (Angie Buhl) in voting SB 187 down.

Fellow educators and sensible senators, thank for your votes to protect what little labor protection South Dakota teachers have.