Pine City, Minnesota

NotEverythingBelongs

ToPotterVille

One of the things that most amazed me about living in the United States in the age of Clinton was the 'can do' attitude of just about everyone I ran into, regardless their political stripe.

Thus, I find the current gridlock that prevents meaningful things that people actually want from getting done to be a real problem.

Of course, the true obstructionists here are the Republicans but there is no ignoring the fact that the Democrats currently control all three branches of the Federal Government.

So.

How to get things done?

Well, in the case of free community college tuition for everyone at least, the small town of Pine City Minnesota, located on what remains of Highway 61 North of Minneapolis, has just buckled down and made it happen.

Ryan Faircloth had the story recently in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Here is his lede:

A rural Minnesota college and its community have found a way to send every local high school graduate to college tuition-free, boosting enrollment and creating a model other state higher education institutions could follow.

Pine Technical and Community College in Pine City has seen its enrollment jump 63% since fall 2016, from 1,035 students to 1,682 this fall, thanks in part to a community-driven effort to send local kids to school tuition-free. It started with a scholarship fund launched by a local entrepreneur and expanded this year when Pine County officials invested nearly half a million dollars of federal COVID-19 stimulus funds to increase scholarship opportunities at the college.

As a result, Pine County is now the only county in Minnesota where every high school graduate can attend college free. Pine Technical and Community College's growth comes as other colleges and universities in the Minnesota State system have seen their enrollments decline an average of 15% since 2016.

"These school districts and the businesspeople and the county commissioners, everybody just said we've got to get more people engaged in this economy to be more competitive," said Pine Technical and Community College President Joe Mulford. "We are not a wealthy region. Our region has kind of come together around the purpose of higher ed and the need for it."...

Heckfire.

And here I thought Bedford Falls was in New York.

And, what's more, I had no idea that Sam Wainright has been reincarnated as a fellow named Dennis Frandsen:

...Entrepreneur Dennis Frandsen created the blueprint, establishing a scholarship fund in 2018 that covers two years of tuition at Pine Tech for graduates from five area high schools, three of them in Minnesota (Braham, Pine City and Rush City) and two in Wisconsin (Luck and Frederic)...

Imagine that!

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You can hear the story...Here.

Reader Mike recently pointed out that the Blog Crawl over on the left sidebar has gone a little squiffy lately...It seems to be a bug in the creaky dinosaur that is the old Blogger platform used here...Thus, I'll try to start providing bloggy links of interest directly once in awhile (just like the old days!)...Today's recommendation is a site called 'You Can Know Things' by a young clinician scientist who knows a thing or two about data analysis and visualization. Recently she took on the question: 'Is there really no correlation between vaccination rate and the spread of COVID?'

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