A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
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There may have to be a re-turning of the phrase "kid in a candy store" when it comes to the childlike excitement Saturday in Esko. Kids at the Lakehead Harvest Festival last weekend had a wide variety of things to do and see, especially when it comes to the main attraction at the festival: tractors and engines and things that move in old-time fashion. And the adults in attendance Saturday looked like kids as they fine-tuned their engines, planed boards, munched on steamed corn and burgers, and...
After two recent bulk mailings sent out to Wrenshall school district residents suggested that complaints about school board member comments in the past 13 months were unfounded, a union group representing district employees delivered the goods on Monday. More than 70 people attended Monday's meeting in Holyoke, where union members read a lengthy statement. In total, there were 24 speakers in a public forum that lasted 90 minutes inside the township hall. Several Education Minnesota-Wrenshall...
A question was raised at the Wrenshall school board’s public forum Monday about where a bulk mailing came from. Was it through a board discussion or the opinion of merely the three people who were represented at the end of the letter? One signee, board vice-chairwoman Cindy Bourn, interrupted the speaker and said the mailing was a “campaign letter.” When asked how a reader would know, Bourn said it was “implied.” In response to an inquiry from the Pine Knot News, chairwoman Bergman said the letter was political and had nothing to do with the...
A case that began in March in St. Paul, when a report was made about a nonconsensual picture taken of a juvenile at the Minnesota Children's Museum there, led police to a 28-year-old Carlton man. What came next was a series of pornographic images and videos of children found on the man's phone and in his cloud storage account. Stephan Jeremiah Hansen was in Sixth Judicial District Court in Carlton July 8 to face 15 felony charges for the explicit content and criminal sexual conduct after Hansen, according to a police report, by admission said...
The talk is preliminary at best, but there is a movement afoot to explore replacing the grass at Bromberg Field in Cloquet with artificial turf. At the Cloquet school board meeting last month, superintendent Michael Cary provided an update on possible future plans for the facility that hosts an aging track and football field. There wasn't much to report, except that the community group that formed several months ago and the board subcommittee were going to meet, after Cary met with the group in...
There are still people living on the second and third floors of the Victory Apartments building, a month after the city of Cloquet warned those residents that without a proper backstairs, an escape in case of fire or other calamity, the apartments are deemed uninhabitable. After an inspection on July 1, the city posted more reminders on apartment doors this week, causing a stir among tenants who construed them as forcible evictions. That isn't the case, said Holly Hansen, the community...
The Wrenshall school board was scheduled to have another meeting to discuss an investigation of “allegations of misconduct” on Thursday, June 30. It wasn’t determined before this issue of the Pine Knot News went to press whether the meeting was open or not. It also wasn’t clear if the board intended to discuss the charges or merely its plans to hire an outside investigator. Earlier in June, the board had two closed meetings to discuss complaints about two employees. Board chairwoman Misty Bergman later said the district employees involve...
South Terrace Elementary School in Carlton has a new principal. The school board on Monday approved the hiring of Donita Stepan, the former superintendent in Thief River Falls in northwestern Minnesota. She will replace Ben Midge, who resigned this spring to take a principal job in southern Minnesota. Midge had been the principal of the entire Carlton school district, covering the elementary through high school grades. Superintendent John Engstrom said a search for a replacement for Midge would be easier if the district posted a job for the ele...
After more than 50 people showed up at its last meeting, the Wrenshall school board held its regular June meeting in the commons area of the school instead of the cramped library. A microphone was deployed so a similar-sized audience could hear what was being discussed Monday. But when it came time to talk about the current controversy consuming the board, the microphones went unused and the mumbled conversation that ensued was difficult to hear even on a playback of a recording. The Monday meeting began like many of the board’s meetings do the...
It began raining at midday on June 19, 2012. Five inches and about 10 hours later, I found myself driving in the heart of what has simply become known as the 2012 flood. I had been working two jobs. One was for the weekly newspaper in Two Harbors and another was for the daily News Tribune in Duluth. When I pulled off the expressway coming back from Two Harbors and into Duluth, I called the News Tribune office and reported what I had seen. Water was covering blocks and blocks of Superior Street and it was rushing down the avenues. Debris was...
John Edison isn’t a Wrenshall school board member, but for all practical purposes on Tuesday night, he was. The attorney representing the school district was on hand for public discussion on the fate of principal Michelle Blanchard and also for two closed sessions on “allegations” against two employees of the district. The board approved another one-year contract for Blanchard, on the advice of Edison, who provided the board a “confidential legal analysis” on how it might proceed with the princ...
The prospects for a high school lacrosse program in Carlton County remain in limbo, but a group supporting placing teams under the Cloquet-Esko-Carlton umbrella is still pressing. Administrators for school districts told the committee on May 12 that they still weren’t convinced of the sustainability of a program. Until the administration is on board, the idea won’t be going to school boards for discussion, said Paul Reiss, activities director at Cloquet High School. He said the number of ath...
The marker on the Cloquet class of 2022 is obvious, and it wasn't ignored last Friday at the outdoor commencement at Bromberg Field. Speakers embraced what this crop of seniors have been through, their final three years of high school scarred by the Covid-19 pandemic. It only made them stronger, they said. Class president Jonah Bryant-Nikko called it the "best and worst times of our lives." Principal Steve Battaglia said the class before him would have laughed if they had been told as...
Spates of rain did not deter Carlton County's honor guards as they made their solemn rounds on Memorial Day Monday. Events at cemeteries and parks across the county were marked by U.S. flags and required umbrellas that added color to a colorless, rain-dotted morning. The rain subsided at St. Matthews Cemetery on North Cloquet Road at 10:30 as people gathered for song and prayer before the Cloquet Combined Honor Guard arrived for the playing of taps and a rifle salute to those lost in service to...
The status of the children formerly in the care of Dawn and Nicole Ammesmaki remains the same after several court appearances in the past month. The two sisters, who once had 10 children in their care, continue to see some of them on supervised visits and the hope that they can soon have unsupervised visits. The cases aren’t likely to be resolved in the courts until at least this fall, as the court calendar has filled up and assessments of the fitness of the two mothers are continuing. In early May, Nicole Ammesmaki entered a not guilty plea i...
In the end, the 2022 session of the Minnesota Legislature left a lot on the table after its deadline Sunday night. Plans on what to do with a huge budget surplus — cutting taxes and spending — remain in limbo as leaders of the two political parties hemmed and hawed this week on whether legislators would come back for a special session. In Carlton County, it means more waiting on state help for the new justice center and funding for improving facilities for the Cloquet Area Fire District. A spe...
In the "clichés are clichés because they are true" department, I offer one here: Newspapers record the first draft of history. For me, there is nothing like going back into newspaper archives and reading first accounts of events, historic and not so historic. It's a passion of mine in downtime, rabbit holes to get lost in. And so it was recently when I went about following up on a reader query about where in the world was the trophy for the 1963 Cloquet basketball team that finished second in th...
After another round of seeking funding to fix the failing outdoor back stairs to his apartment building, Roger Bruhn said this week that he has come up empty again. It likely means that by June 1, upper-level residents at the Victory Apartments will need to find housing after the city of Cloquet deemed the stairs a hazard and the top two floors "uninhabitable" without a fix. The stairs serve as the only direct exit for the upper floors of the building at 17 Eighth Street, across from the...
Bridget Peterson, a media specialist at the schools in Esko, held a door open for two elementary students on Tuesday. One of them said: "Thank you for being yellow." Peterson beamed. "That was so cool." "Yellow" has been the code word for kindness the past few weeks at the elementary school in a courtesy and kindness campaign dubbed "Be the Yellow," based on a national and worldwide campaign launched by a teacher in honor of one of his colleagues. "I'm the instigator," admitted kindergarten...
Luckily for the Cloquet community, Darlene Carter has a propensity to get bored. Or "lonely, I guess," she said this month as she was honored for 45 years of volunteer service at Community Memorial Hospital, which this year will mark 64 years in existence. "She has given half of her life to the hospital - remarkable," said Rick Breuer, the CEO and administrator at the hospital. "She's a one-of-a-kind saint." "You have to stop sometime," she said with a slight chuckle after her final day. "It's...
The Cloquet Forestry Center has hit the big time. Well, it really has already made a name for itself in scientific circles. Researchers there are always happy to share what they are working on and when National Geographic came calling, they were more than agreeable to talk about its decade of work on deciphering just what northern Minnesota's forests may look like as the climate changes. Two photographs taken from the forestry center are featured in an article in the May edition of National...
When Carlton school board members decided in January to cut funding for a spring play director, Amanda Radtke decided she would volunteer to direct, even though she had no experience and "very little theater" in her background. But, as the academic, social and emotional learning advisor in the district, she knows her students. "The play is something the kids look forward to every year," she said this week. And so it is that high school students will present "Check Please," a humorous and very...
In pure Minnesotan parlance, it could be worse. This month, a tree infested with emerald ash borer larvae was spotted in Cloquet, marking the first confirmed sighting of the tree-killing pest in the county. Ash borers have also recently been found in Lake County, especially in Two Harbors, and have been in Duluth for several years. "The good news is that it's not as rampant in Cloquet," said Kimberly Thielen Cremers, a plant protection expert at the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. In Two...
I probably did not adequately express to Jana the trauma I felt when we discovered a boxelder bug in the front window of the Pine Knot News office this week. I had just spent most of the morning talking to people about ash borers, and their official arrival in Cloquet. The emerald ash borer is a real problem. Its infestation kills ash trees, threatening a large chunk of the hardwood tree canopy across southern and eastern Minnesota as of this week. Boxelder bugs? Well, they say they are harmless. They munch on boxelder tree leaves all summer...
The mood at the Carlton school board meeting was subdued, an obvious reaction to what was on the agenda: more cuts to education programs as the board seeks to find $250,000 in budget savings for the next school year. After Monday, it was $135,000 short of that goal as an estimated $115,000 in cuts have been made. There were mixed votes on all five reductions offered Monday, with just one failing on a tied vote. Moving arts classes to an online-only option failed, with those voting against saying the arts gets the ax too often when budget cuts...
