(Created: Thursday, October 18, 2007 10:29 PM CDT)
By GREG C. HUFF - Sun Newspapers
Paul Dorr asks for a lot. He doesn't answer much. Especially questions about why he fights school-funding levies in communities far from his northwestern Iowa home.
A consultant hired to oppose the $9.7 million operating levy Robbinsdale Public Schools is requesting in a referendum, Dorr has asked the district for much information about its finances, enrollment, staffing and academic performance - a dozen specific requests. He's asked for much the same in districts in which he's fought 54 ballot questions and defeated 46; one remains tied up in court.
But in phone and e-mail interviews this fall, Dorr has declined to answer questions about his Robbinsdale Schools campaign, the people who hired him, or how much he charges for his services. Nor would Dorr answer several questions about his past, which reportedly includes founding an anti-abortion group, running a Y2K supply store, and writing a column in which he lauded Christian home-schooling and advocated dismantling the public-school system.
Dorr did agree to respond to some critics' characterizations of his levy-fighting tactics. For more information about that, see the related article on this website. 'Why I Defeat ... Levies.' Although Dorr declined in an e-mail interview this month to address his motivation for defeating public-school funding levies, he made his case previously in a 2002-copyrighted web-published column he wrote - "Why I Defeat Government School Bond Levies At The Ballot Box And Do It For A Profit."
Dorr confirmed authorship of the column - available at www.lewrockwell.com - but declined to address its contents, including his strategies to "hasten the day" of the public-school system's "demise," and his self-identification as one of "many ... seeking to advance the kingdom of Christ." Offered an opportunity to address the column's contents, he replied in an e-mail interview, "No comment."
Dorr characterized himself in the column as a "pro-family political activist," said he's a former half-owner of an Iowa community bank, and that he has 11 children, whom his wife home-schools. He wrote that "More traditional Christian education ... is offering a superior education for its children, too." Public-education officials, Dorr said in the column - calling them "statist bureaucrats" and "educrats" - are "on a mission to destroy liberty in this nation, by destroying the founding Christian faith that made it possible and replacing it with their humanist group think 'New Jerusalem.' ... They've masked their freedom-destroying, anti-intellectual efforts for decades under the ruse of educational 'neutrality.' Well, the neutrality myth is about over." Responsible home-schooled children, Dorr said in the column, "are now starting to become pervasive enough that they are publicly being well received if not seen as superior students."
In the Oct. 2 e-mail interview, Dorr provided a more contemporary opinion of the public-school system: "Unless one believes local voters are just fools, the financial pain they are experiencing from tax spenders is just imaginary, and that their grandkid's (sic) so often found inability to do simple math after high school is, too, imaginary, it would then appear by my record that most voters trust my clients and me and it is the district they don't trust. ..."
Past pursuits
Dorr hasn't always focused his energy on school-funding referendums. According to a July 6, 2005, article in Minneapolis-based City Pages, Dorr founded an anti-abortion group, Rescue the Perishing Christian Family Ministry, and in 1999 opened Back Dorr Friends Pantry, a Y2K supply store that sold dried milk and dehydrated fruits and vegetables. City Pages reported that Dorr has a degree in agricultural business from Iowa State University, that his family runs a farm in Cherokee County, Iowa, and described Dorr as "a distant cousin to the Music Man, driving from town to town, painting a picture of failing schools and waste, collecting pay-outs from disgruntled locals who don't want to hand over new taxes."
The "bigger battle" Dorr is waging, City Pages reported, "is on public education in its totality, an institution he believes should be dismantled and scrapped." Offered an opportunity to address information in the City Pages article, Dorr replied, "No comment as most of this stuff is 10 to 20 years ago." He did, however, characterize his mission differently than did the City Pages: "What I really do is to show local district stakeholders how to stand up to the propaganda stream and bullying so often found by school administrators. That is the part the administrators don't like and why they then distort my efforts."
Citizens Acting for Responsible Education - 281 CARE hired Dorr in September. For more coverage of both 281 CARE and of a group supporting the proposed levy, see the related article on this website.
Additional reporting by Sue Webber.
Copyright © 2007. Sun Newspapers