Last week’s (March 13, 2008) Park Ridge Herald-Advocate contains a trio of letters to the editor that are definitely worth a look.

That trifecta is kicked off by “Fix neglected Cumberland Ave” by Ellen and Mike Ribaudo, which makes the spot-on observation that Park Ridge is seriously under-achieving its upscale image with its infrastructure, especially when a main thoroughfare like Cumberland Avenue is a dangerous and embarrassing collection of potholes.

As the Ribaudos point out, we pay heavy-duty property taxes for what should be top-drawer infrastructure, but isn’t.  Of course, when Mayor Frimark and his Alderpuppets (Allegretti, Bach, Carey, DiPietro and Ryan) are more concerned with giving away millions of our tax dollars to Frimark campaign contributors like Napleton Cadillac, or giving above-appraisal purchase offers to unidentified property owners (like whoever owns American Insurance Agency), who’s got the time or the money to worry about such mundane matters as potholes?

                    *                           *                           *
Dan Knight’s “On efforts to condemn openness” provides another dose of well-deserved criticism of Frimark’s and The Alderpuppets’ “condemnation” of 1^st Ward Ald. Dave Schmidt’s crusade against the over-use and abuse of closed session meetings and questionably “confidential” information that combine to deprive us ordinary citizens of “timely and full disclosure of matters of importance.”

Knight correctly asks those condemners to “try breaking out of the insularity of the apparent closed circle of friends and supporters who will tell you what you want to hear” and start talking to the rest of their constituents.  Good advice, Mr. Knight…but don’t hold your breath.

                    *                           *                           *
Last but not least is a letter from Robert Smith, who takes the District 64 School Board to task – with his “Promises didn’t include more positions” – for how they are already starting to spend the extra tax money we gave them via last April’s referendum. 

Smith sounds betrayed, and rightly so, because Supt. Sally Pryor and the Board let Smith and others who worked for the passage of the referendum hustle the voters with promises “that 100 percent of the additional funds raised [through that referendum] would go into the classroom” rather than for new administrators and staff.

Too bad Mr. Smith and the others weren’t paying attention since the late 1990s when Dist. 64 imported a superintendant from another district to sell us a $20 Million new middle school (Emerson) that appears to have started the District down a road of deficit spending and financial mismanagement that included landing on the State Board of Education’s financial “Watch List” of districts who can’t manage their finances.  Notwithstanding almost $12 Million of budget cuts – that the District insisted would not harm the quality of education – and a less-than-honest “backdoor referendum” in 2005 through which the District borrowed an additional $5 Million in working cash bonds so that it could use the incoming tax revenues to shore up its depleted fund balances without actually going to the voters for the money, the District still needed last April’s referendum. 

But now, flush with that fresh cash, it looks like the District has given itself the green light for spending on such proven education quality-enhancing features as more administrators.  Which brings to mind the words of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg who, writing in The Wall Street Journal this past December, criticized the American education system in a way that seems to apply in spades to Dist. 64:

[W]e have built too many bureaucracies that lack clear lines of accountability, which means that mediocrity and failure are tolerated, and excellence goes unrewarded. We recruit a disproportionate share of teachers from among the bottom third of their college classes. Then we give them lifetime tenure after three years, and we reward them based on longevity, not performance.

But so long as we let District 64’s Board and bureaucrats get away with what they’ve been getting away with for more than a decade, we’ll keep on getting what we’re getting.