It was just two years ago that Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 rolled out its new Chromebook-based curriculum to great fanfare and applause, almost all of which was generated by the D-64 Board and Administration.

We wrote about it in our 07.21.14 post and our 08/26/14 post.

The Chromebooks were going to be the latest “magic bullet” for raising the District’s stagnant-to-sliding academic performance – as demonstrated by those pesky standardized test that provide those annoying objectively-measurable test results. Or maybe they were only intended to be $778,000 worth of new shiny objects to divert attention away from those test scores and related rankings.

Anybody who dared question the power and accuracy of this latest “magic bullet” was ridiculed as old fashioned, an unenlightened naysayer, and/or anti-child. That’s the strategy of choice by the “professional” education establishment, although just typing those words makes us laugh.

So far, however, we’ve neither seen nor heard about any improvement in academic performance. And if one entertains the possibility that the performance of Maine South students is affected by the educational quality of its D-64 feeder schools, the slide in Maine South’s performance becomes a tad ominous.

So we have to shake our head over a recent Park Ridge Herald-Advocate article reported (“All Chromebooks to be replaced in District 64, officials say,” May 2) how all of the District’s 2,782 “Generation 1” Chromebooks are going to be replaced, reportedly free of charge, with “Generation 2” Chromebooks by the manufacturer, Dell. The reason: more than half of them underwent repairs just this year alone, including a 25% breakdown rate for the computers’ logic boards.

The H-A article places the District’s cost of those repairs at $103,000 worth of parts and labor. So far, there’s no word from D-64 as to whether Dell will reimburse the District for those costs.

Two years ago the chief D-64 propagandist, Bernadette Tramm – still on the job today, sad to say – and a coterie of her sub-spinners were assuring anyone who would listen that those Generation 1 Chromebooks would have a four-year life cycle. Less than two full years later, however, Mary Jane Warden, the District’s director of innovation and instructional technology, and Finance Czarina Luann Kolstad are singing a very different tune.

“Expecting a product like a Chromebook to last a full four years of wear and tear may be too ambitious to sustain.”

What a difference two years makes.

We can’t figure out how Warden and the District’s other tech gurus didn’t see this coming two years ago because, according to Warden’s and Kolstad’s memo to the D-64 Board, “the Chromebooks are so new to the market, [and] there has been no history of product reliability or performance that we can put full confidence in.” But two years ago there was even less of a history.

Not surprisingly, that didn’t stop Warden from recommending the purchase of, or our School Board members and administrators from spending $778,000 of the taxpayers’ money on, 2,782 of the untried and unreliable critters.

And now they’re going to replace the Generation 1 Chromebook with Generation 2 Chromebooks, even though – according to Warden – Dell has not explained why the Generation 1s failed.

“I’m confident going forward we’ll have a better product,” she told the school board.

Just as confident as she was two years ago.

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One of the more memorable scenes in that iconic 1967 movie, “The Graduate,” involves a brief, profoundly superficial conversation between protagonist Benjamin Braddock and one of his parents’ friends, in which the latter imparts a one-word career revelation to the newly-minted grad:

“Plastics.”

In a life-imitates-art sort of way, the “educators” at Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District 64 have come up with their own one-word revelation for ostensibly improving academic performance of D-64 students:

“Chromebooks.”

That was the watchword at the June 10th D-64 School Board meeting at which that Board voted 6-1 (Board pres. Tony Borrelli dissenting) to purchase 675 Chromebooks for $190,000 as part of a yearlong test of whether D-64 should purchase Chromebooks for every student.  Borrelli wanted to perform this test by purchasing only 157 Chromebooks, which would have replaced that same number of outdated Macbooks.  Borrelli’s more measured test reportedly would have saved the District $145,000.

But anybody who has observed the workings of D-64 over the past several years can read the handwriting on the Smartboards: this “test” stage is just a charade for those taxpaying suckers gullible enough to believe that it’s actually some kind of due diligence evaluation.  In reality, Chromebooks for every student (other than Grades K-2, for which iPads are the device of choice) is virtually a done deal.

Interestingly enough, we could find no mention of any clear, objective metrics by which the D-64 Board and Administration intend to determine the success or failure of this yearlong Chromebook experiment.  Then again, done deals don’t need metrics.

But given the chronic lackluster performance by D-64 students on the ISAT standardized examinations over the past several years, Chromebook-generated improvement measured by higher ISAT scores would have been a welcome, albeit novel, concept.  Or perhaps those two well-paid “tech coaches” D-64 hired a couple of years ago could come up with some other kind of measurement standard.

As “education” continues to be transformed into an alternate universe where customary measures of achievement are being supplanted by a culture of lowered standards, faux self-esteem, and a lack of accountability – by teachers and by the elected and appointed officials charged with directing and managing that process – Chromebooks are seemingly being touted as the latest “silver bullet” cure for whatever may be ailing our kids’ academic performances.

Not surprisingly, the folks at D-64 are carefully maintaining the charade that the Chromebooks are less about the technology and more about the learning.  For example, an April 22, 2013 story in the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“District 64 eyes iPads, Chromebooks for every kid”) describes how D-64 director of technology Terri Bresnahan extolled the Chromebook’s web-based platform, how inappropriate material can be easily filtered out, how it has a full keyboard, and how it is fully integrated with Google educational applications – all without mentioning any academic goals or standards for Chromebook-based learning.

Meanwhile, that same article reported that Board members John Heyde and Scott Zimmerman praised the District – and, by implication, themselves – for focusing on student learning and not technology for technology’s sake, also without mentioning any measurable Chromebook-related performance goals or standards.

Yet according to a more recent article in the Park Ridge Journal (“Dist. 64 Schools Go With Chromebooks,” June 13), Bresnahan proclaimed “the mission of the district is to advance the use of technology.”  And Board member Terry Cameron echoed Bresnahan with: “If we’re truly committed to technology we have to be willing to spend the money to [bring Chromebooks to the classrooms].”

That sure sounds like technology for technology’s sake to us.  Probably because it is.

We’re big fans of technology.  But as best we can tell, technology still hasn’t found a way to transcend GIGO: garbage in = garbage out.  And it doesn’t appear that D-64 has come up with adequate standards or an exacting  protocol for making a sound decision on Chromebooks, much less a persuasive case for such a significant commitment of time and money to such a Chromebook test.

But in the words of the Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland”: “Sentence first – verdict afterwards.”

And for the folks running D-64, that one-word sentence is…“Chromebooks.”

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Several weeks ago we took a few shots at the Park Ridge Fire Dept. and Chief Sorensen in our post: “Fire Chief’s Salary Beef Too Little, Too Late” (06.16.16)

As we wrote back then, we believed Chief S was better than that particular performance would indicate. So we’re happy to read a Sept. 1 article in the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate about how he and the department’s executive officer Paul Lisowski were able to secure a FEMA grant that will provide $500,000 toward the replacement of the department’s 21 year-old fire engine that had become a maintenance problem due to the almost 130,000 miles it has logged.

The cost to Park Ridge: $50,000.

That warrants a big “Huzzah!” to Chief S, EO Lisowski, and whoever else made this possible.

Fortunately, that $500,000 grant comes with another dividend that should not be overlooked: the trenchant observation by Chief S that his department’s inability to get the new engine other than by this grant was the result of the City’s financial condition.

For those folks who just can’t seem to figure out public-sector economics, the idea that the City does not have the available cash to spring for a new fire engine might be scoff-worthy. They tend to see government, in its every form and iteration, as some kind of uber-wealthy uncle always able to pick up the dinner tab and still indiscriminately dole out virtually unlimited funds.

But the City’s inability to easily buy new fire trucks – at a cool half mil a pop – is just one of the many consequences of almost two decades of foolish spending, idiotic borrowing, irresponsible under-taxing, and sweetheart deals under former mayors Wietecha, Marous and Frimark, aided and abetted by at least one manipulative and outright dishonest city manager, enabled by a gaggle of complicit alder-dunces.

Those mistakes are still tying the hands and purse-strings of the current mayor and Council, and will continue to do so for years to come. But beginning in 2009 with the administration of the late mayor Dave Schmidt, the adoption of more transparent and accountable taxing, budgeting and spending policies and practices started to turn things around. And that turnaround has continued under the stewardship of Acting Mayor Marty Maloney and the current Council,

Unfortunately, that steady course of improvement over the past 7 years is not yet sufficiently institutionalized to the point where it can’t be blown up with just a few injudicious and expensive ideas and/or decisions, especially if they involve large amounts of long-term bonded debt. Should you need an object lesson to understand this concept, look no further than the City’s foolish issuance of tens of millions of dollars of 20-plus year General Obligation bonds a decade ago, used effectively to subsidize the private Uptown Redevelopment project pushed through without even giving the taxpayers a chance to express their opinion via a referendum.

Equally problematic is what appears to be an increasing number of newer residents who talk and act like every one of our units of local government is sitting on its own gold mine staffed by a contingent of elves who simply dig up a few more shiny nuggets anytime teachers and administrators want raises, parents want hot lunches, and kids want Chromebooks.

Yes, Kathy Meade, f/k/a “Kathy Panattoni Meade,” that means you.

On September 1 Ms. Meade posted the H-A story about the fire engine grant on the Park Ridge Concerned Homeowners Group FB page, and then commented about this being “a phenomenal opportunity to get a brand new state-of-the-art engine for the price of an entry-level Lexus.”

Such childlike naïvete (or freeloader-ism, take your pick) completely ignores the tens of millions of dollars Park Ridge taxpayers send to Washington (i.e., FEMA) and Springfield each year with only a tiny fraction of that treasure being returned through things like FEMA fire engine grants – while federal and state politicians use the rest of our tax dollars to fund other communities’ fire trucks, police cruisers, community centers, libraries and schools even though some/many of those communities are no more economically-distressed than Park Ridge.

Maybe even less.

So when all is said and done, we didn’t get a new fire engine for the price of an entry-level Lexus: We got a new fire engine for the price of several Lexus dealerships.

Meanwhile, we’re now into the fourth decade of corrupt Madigan Democrat rule, aided and abetted by complicit and/or corrupt RINO governors Thompson, Edgar and No. 16627-424, that has turned state government into one big shell game, except with several dozen shells to most effectively bamboozle the clueless taxpayers. That’s how Madigan, Cullerton, et al. can keep on robbing Peter to pay Paul – and Andrew, James, John, Thomas, James, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Simon, Jude, Thaddeus, Linus, Cletus, Clement, Sixtus, Cornelius, Cyprian, Lawrence, Chrysogonus, John, Paul, Cosmas and Damian – without looking at the business end of the federal indictments they so richly deserve.

Simply by throwing communities like Park Ridge an occasional bone. Or fire engine.

Don’t get us wrong: a fire truck from FEMA beats a sharp stick in the eye any day. And you can be darn sure that if we didn’t get it, Rockford…or Fargo ND…or Athens GA…or Bakersfield CA…would. That’s the kind of merry-go-round spending that keeps the freeloaders hooked like crackheads, and our governments growing like Topsy.

So another round of applause for Chief S and EO Lisowski for getting us that shiny new fire engine for the price of a Lexus.

Entry-level.

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A common adage from a bygone era – before anyone could make themselves a “victim” just by claiming to be one – was: “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.”

How quaint.

Nowadays, however, while truth remains a legal defense to defamation (libel and slander), truth has no similar power to defend against accusations of political incorrectness – or of being “judgmental” and saying things that are “disrespectful” and “hurtful” – no matter how unreasonable the accusation, and no matter how gossamer-thin and  fragile the accuser’s professed sensibilities.

Hence the whining and faux-outrage about our referring to certain Park Ridge residents as “freeloaders” and certain non-residents as “parasites.”

For readers not up on that vernacular, we use “freeloaders” as shorthand for a description that would otherwise require the 16 words the Merriam-Webster online uses to describe such people: “a person who is supported by or seeks support from another without making an adequate return.” Merriam-Webster lists the arguably more pejorative “bloodsucker,” “leech,“ “moocher” and “sponger” as synonyms. And although it also lists “parasite” as a synonym, we reserve that for non-resident freeloaders who can’t even claim to be paying Park Ridge RE taxes to justify their freeloading.

Not surprisingly, those descriptions offend the freeloaders and the parasites – much bright light offends cockroaches.

Like the fabled emperor who didn’t take kindly to being ridiculed by an honest young lad for walking around buck nekkid after coming to expect his subjects’ foolish awe at his glorious, albeit imaginary, raimant, freeloaders don’t take kindly to being identified as serial appropriators and abusers of Other People’s Money (“OPM”), especially when it’s coming not from far-off Washington but from their neighbors.

But our calling out freeloaders and parasites is not just a gratuitous slap at them and their ilk, or a quest for economy of verbiage. Identifying them and the problems they cause goes to the sustainability and future of Park Ridge as we know it.

How can Park Ridge remain a stable and desirable upper-middle/lower-upper class community when a significant number of residents actually seem to pride themselves on consistently taking out far more in services than they put in via taxes…and then brazenly insist on even more, especially from the schools?

They want free Chromebooks. They want no fees for anything. They want low-cost hot lunches. They want free full-day kindergarten. And that’s just for starters.

As every non-comatose resident should know, Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 spends roughly $14,000 (and rising, naturally) per pupil per year, all in. As best as we can tell from available data, however, the median Park Ridge residence is worth around $365,000 and annually pays less than $9,000 in RE taxes, of which less than $3,000 goes to D-64.

Do the math.

A young family in a median-value home putting just one child through D-64 schools for a typical 9 years (K-8) will receive $126,000 – not factoring in unknown variables like increased school costs, tax increases, inflation, etc. – of “free” education during that same 9-year period. Meanwhile, during those same 9 years that family will pay a mere $27,000 in taxes to D-64.

That’s leaves a $99,000 shortfall that will take an additional 33 years of taxpaying – in addition to those 9 educational years – for that family to equalize.

Add a second kid to the mix and that family is now taking out $252,000 of “free” education while still paying only that same $27,000 in RE taxes to D-64 – pushing the shortfall up to $225,000 and pushing the payback period out to 75 years!

Which means those Park Ridge freeloaders who like to brag on Facebook and elsewhere about how they’ll be moving out of Park Ridge the moment their kids graduate – like locusts moving on after they’ve stripped the fields and consumed everything worth consuming – will NEVER come remotely close to making up any significant part of their kids’ educational cost deficit.

And, worse yet, when that family which still “owes” $99,000 or $252,000 is excess education debt sells its Park Ridge home, it likely will be to another young family that will run up its own comparable deficits before similarly moving on. Leaving those massive debts to be covered entirely by OPM.

Which will drive up the cost for everyone NOT receiving $14,000 – or $28,000 or $42,000 – of “free” education for their $3-4-5,000 of RE taxes paid to D-64. And that will make Park Ridge economically undesirable, if not outright hostile, to all those folks providing the OPM.

Anticipating the carping this post will inspire, we wish to make clear that we share the view of author John Green that the benefit of paying taxes for public schools without actually having kids in them is that it reduces the likelihood of living with a bunch of stupid people. That doesn’t require or justify, however, paying top-shelf prices for a second-shelf product.

Keep that in mind as our overmatched D-64 School Board continues to scheme, in secretive closed session “negotiations,” with the PREA about how to put more tax money in the teachers’ pockets while demanding no more (and no better quality) work that raises the educational rankings to the levels of the Glenviews, Northbrooks and similar higher-end communities who are able to offer better-ranked schools and greater educational value at a similar cost to Park Ridge.

And then ask yourself, your friends and your neighbors this simple question:

How can this madcap tax, borrow and spend carousel that is almost totally dependent on OPM be sustainable?

To read or post comments, click on title.

Over the weekend we were working on a post about Park Ridge-Niles School District 64’s replacement of all its 2,782 Chromebooks after more than half of them underwent repairs just this year alone, according to an article in last week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“All Chromebooks to be replaced in District 64, officials say,” May 2).

But then we received an over-the-transom gift: a forwarded e-mail from D-64 Supt. Laurie Heinz announcing “a new style of online forum called Thoughtexchange.”

With apologies to The Who: Meet the new cooked survey, same as the old cooked survey.

That caused us to look at the Report for tonight’s Board Meeting, where we discovered even more propaganda about this new Thoughtexchange survey in Appendix 4 – starting with all the usual buzzwords and phrases designed to excite and mesmerize the usual simpletons, like “very innovative new format,” “online outreach tool,” “various stakeholder groups,” “360-degree online dialogue” (Wouldn’t that be talking in circles?), “very engaging,” “fresh approach” and “engage them in the process,” all of which we’ve highlighted in yellow for your convenience.

According to Heinz and the District’s propaganda minister, Bernadette Tramm, the Thoughtexchange process got an “enthusiastic response” from Heinz’s handpicked “Community Relations Council.” And we would expect no less of the CRC, which we wrote about in our 10.08.15 post. In fairness, not every one of those CRC members are stooges or shills for Heinz, but you can be sure that one of the reasons Heinz picked them in the first place was that she subscribes to the “We don’t want nobody that nobody sent” Chicago-style of politics – as do most bureaucrats in this corrupt state.

And the reason Chicago-style bureaucrats pick stooges and shills is that they tend not to have the ability and/or the desire to detect all the “bullsh*t” – as Jon Stewart so keenly and eloquently elucidated it in his final monologue (see the video here, read the transcript here) last August – that is regularly dispensed by the likes of the D-64 Board and Administration. Or to actually possess the courage to say something even if they did detect it.

Notwithstanding all of Heinz’s and Tramm’s buzzwords and phrases in Appendix 4, we’ve highlighted the real b.s. in orange, starting with calling the result of this goat rodeo “a satisfaction survey that can be used primarily with staff and parents.” [Emphasis added.]

That’s because this survey is being designed to pander to the basest concerns and desires of the folks with the most to gain from manipulating the process to justify spending even more money with no better results: “staff,” who already appear to be overpaid based on D-64’s lackluster (if not declining) performance – as measured by standardized testing, not intramural havel-gazing – yet are in the process of negotiating for more, more, more; and “parents” for whom money is no object so long as they can get away with paying only around 25 cents on the dollar in RE taxes for the D-64 $14-15,000 education for their first kid, and ZERO for every additional kid.

That’s one big reason why “[a]ll parents and staff will receive direct email invitations to participate” in this survey “through May and into early June.” That way, D-64 can hope to receive as many of those special-interest responses as possible (and as few of the regular taxpayer responses as possible) before the District announces the latest sweetheart contract it has been negotiating in secret with the teachers union – a report about which is listed on tonight’s meeting agenda as one of two items scheduled for a special two-hour secretive closed session, starting at 5:30.

Will dinner be served…at taxpayer expense?

And don’t think it’s any coincidence that neither Heinz’s e-mail nor Appendix 4 lists any of the “3 open-ended questions about our schools and District” the Thoughtexchange survey allegedly will be asking, even though those questions must already have been vetted by the Board (or at least we would hope so, although we can’t find any evidence of it) and are locked and loaded if the plan is to collect all the responses “through May and early June.” By not listing the questions, it’s a lot tougher for our flummoxed local media (or any pesky bloggers and taxpayers) to shoot holes in them before the answers start rolling in.

So we’ll offer three open-ended questions of our own, just for grins:

1. Why has D-64’s standardized testing performance been stagnant-to-declining compared to other districts with similar economic profiles and per-student spending?

2. How will D-64 schools help Park Ridge taxpayers maintain and increase their property values in the face of those stagnant-to-declining comparables while RE taxes keep increasing?

3. Why does the D-64 Board keep rewarding administrators and staff with more money for stagnant-to-declining student performance?

Don’t expect those questions, or anything like them, being asked by Thoughtexchange.

And as best as we can tell from perusing the Thoughtexchange.com website, what we can expect is another typical collection of easily-manipulable anonymous data points collected through a process that might not even be immune to the kind of “ballot-box stuffing” – multiple responses by the same people – that characterize all those half-baked SurveyMonkey surveys and Change.Org. petitions so many of our local elected officials and bureaucrats prefer for their finger-to-the-wind management decisions.

The sad truth is that this isn’t even intended to be a legitimate “community” survey focusing on what two-thirds (or more) of Park Ridge households who DON’T have kids in D-64 schools think about D-64. It’s a charade and a  propaganda exercise by a dishonest Administration conspiring with a bumbling School Board to cover up the District’s pitiful lack of educational, managerial and financial competence.

And, worst of all, it cheats both the taxpayers AND the students.

To read or post comments, click on title.

We haven’t had all that many good things to say about Dathan Paterno since he was elected to the School Board of Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 in April 2013 – with our endorsement in which, among other things, we praised his view of referendums “not as last resorts in times of crisis but as proactive educational tools that ‘would afford voters/taxpayers a greater awareness of the financial woes of the district and the policies that contributed to those woes.'”

Unfortunately, he has been a dependable vote for the secretive closed session meetings that have become routine under current Board president Tony Borrelli and his overpaid BFF superintendent.

And for each vote Paterno casts for the District’s taxpayers (e.g., his vote against giving Supt. Laurie Heinz an estimated $20K raise after just one year of unspectacular performance), he seems to cast at least two boneheaded spendthrift ones (e.g., his vote to give Heinz a one-year contract extension worth $250K after that same one year of unspectacular performance; and $500K to provide middle-schoolers with “free” Chromebooks).

Meanwhile, objectively-measurable educational performance at D-64 remains stagnant while costs continue to rise, and Paterno and his colleagues remain silent as church mice.

So despite D-64’s spending around $14,000 per pupil, per year, one of our community’s major growth industries has become tutoring – to compensate for the lack of learning actually taking place in those big-spending schools.

But Paterno appears to have found an acorn with his criticism of the District’s plan to spend $6 million to secure the vestibules of its school buildings, as expressed in his Letter to the Editor in last week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“$6 million doors just a placebo for District 64,” Nov. 3).

As Paterno correctly points out, events like Sandy Hook are extreme rarities which become hyper-exaggerated primarily by a news media whose credo for too long has been: “If it bleeds, it leads” – and by all those “helicopter parents” who want no expense spared on their children, especially if that expense is paid for primarily with Other People’s Money (“OPM”); i.e., the taxpayers’ money.

Notably, Paterno’s opposition to spending $6 million to secure the schools’ vestibules does not seem to reflect an overall concern with D-64 spending $6 million. Given his record on the Board over the past two years, that means he’s already got one or more other places he’d rather spend it.

But improving education and the students’ performance metrics doesn’t appear to be one of them.

Not surprisingly, we couldn’t glean very much from the last couple of months of sketchy School Board meeting minutes and corresponding “Reports,” but we are hearing that the “vestibule” projects are actually school building additions that will contain and/or accommodate those secured vestibules – and which comprise a substantial portion of those “vestibule” costs.

In other words, it’s not just about “security” – something we would have expected Paterno to have mentioned in his letter if his goal was to play it totally straight with the taxpayers.

Speaking of playing it totally straight with the taxpayers, it looks and sounds like D-64’s Secrecy Patrol has done its typically excellent-but-deplorable job of keeping the taxpayers clueless not only about the building additions aspect of the “vestibule” work but, also, about the Board’s consideration – per “Appendix 3” of it’s November 5, 2015 meeting “Report” – of doing the $15-20 million of 2016 building work without referendum – by pulling $10 million out of the District’s semi-sacrosanct fund balance “and issuing in spring 2016 a small non-referendum bond issue of $5M-$10M.”

In other words, the Borrelli-led D-64 Board is seriously considering a plan that makes sure we taxpayers don’t even get a referendum vote on this first wave of $15-20 Million of spending – before they start dumping the next $12 Million, or $26 Million, of additional planned “health, life, safety” expenditures on us.

And because of his silence about this scheme, we have to question whether Paterno is merely asleep at the wheel or actually a co-conspirator in that scheme.

But asleep or co-conspiring, he nevertheless seems to have gotten it right with his observation that “secure vestibules would not appreciably reduce the risk of violence to our children and staff” because: (a) there appear to be no reports of attacks on American schools that were foiled by secure vestibules, and (b) an assailant bent on harming schoolchildren can find much easier targets on the playgrounds during recess, or walking out the doors at day’s end.

This community’s history demonstrates that school children are more at risk from crossing streets – either on foot or on bicycle – than from armed assailants. This new obsession with secured vestibules, however, reminds us of the anti-O’Hare Chicken Littles who’ve been warning of an imminent plane crash into Maine South for the past couple of decades, if not longer.

Not surprisingly, the District’s architect of record, FGM Architects, is 100% behind pushing forward with all this new construction. According to a Park Ridge Herald-Advocate story from October 13, 2015 (“Roofs, windows, doors targeted for repairs and upgrades in District 64”), just a preliminary study of these projects will put over $300K in FGM’s pocket. And then there is likely to be a percentage of the total cost of the projects FGM will grab for coordinating and/or overseeing them.

That’s because FGM gets paid for bricks and mortar, not for any improvements to the quality of education within the walls those bricks and mortar comprise.

So we’re grateful for Paterno’s having called attention to the likelihood that spending a whopping $6 million on “secured vestibules” – with or without the building additions he failed to mention – is far from the highest and best use of that money. Whether his silence about the Board’s looting of its own fund balance and its non-referendum borrowing calls into question the motive(s) and validity of his criticism, however, remains to be seen.

But for somebody who has pretty much been lost in the Borrelli’s/Heinz closed-session funhouse for the last two years, getting anything right deserves at least a qualified kudo.

Now, if only he can stay awake and attentive for the remaining two years of his term.

UPDATE (11.13.15)  This week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate is reporting (“District 64 board divided on $6 million secure doors,” Nov. 10) that Paterno was taken to task by at least a couple of his fellow Board members at the Nov. 5 Board meeting. And, not surprisingly, secrecy-uber-alles Board president Tony Borrelli was one of them.

“ ‘When these things are crafted, you have to be very careful,’ said Borrelli. ‘Any time after tonight would have been perfect.’ ”

Translation: When D-64 orchestrates a process to achieve a particular result, don’t screw up the orchestration! Or at least don’t screw it up until the fat lady’s done singing.

And Board member Bob Johnson didn’t seem to like the way Paterno took his case directly to the people rather than confining it to a Board meeting:

“I think that a much better forum for what had been written would be here,” Johnson is reported to have said.

Translation: If you only say it at a Board meeting, D-64’s propaganda minister, Bernadette Tramm, can have a chance to spin it, and maybe even keep it out of the newspaper so the public isn’t the wiser.

But we need to note that Board member Tom Sotos, himself not all that impressive since his election last April, appears to have stood up for Paterno and the transparency his comments added to the issue:

“I think actually [Paterno] stepped in the right direction….”

Exactly.

Now let’s see if Paterno can do that on other topics – and if Sotos starts stepping in the right direction himself.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Yesterday we talked about showing the door to the incumbent Maine Twp. High School District 207 Board members because they have demonstrated they can’t, or won’t, do the job the students and taxpayers deserve. Today we shift gears to the contested race for three 4-year seats on Park Ridge-Niles School District 64.

Actually, those seats aren’t all that “contested” because there are only four candidates vying for the three seats. So the only suspense is finding out who is going to be the odd man out among incumbent Tony Borrelli and challengers Greg Bublitz, Mark Eggemann and Tom Sotos.

If the Park Ridge Education Association (the “PREA”) – the teachers union – has its way, that odd man will be Eggemann, which would be reason enough to endorse him.

That because the PREA exists solely to put more money and better benefits in the pockets of its members, while avoiding as much accountability as it can get away with. And the PREA has gotten away with that for years while student performance has stagnated or even declined compared to higher-scoring districts in Glenview, Northbrook and those other suburban communities with which Park Ridge competes for new residents.

Worse yet, D-64’s under-performance may be contributing to the marked decline in the performance and ranking of Maine South, which dropped a dozen slots in its student performance rankings in just three years!

Eggemann is the husband of Maine Twp. Republican Committeewoman (and Park Ridge Library Board member) Char Foss-Eggemann. He also served as the late Mayor Dave Schmidt’s 2013 campaign manager. Both of those facts rub certain people – the Kool-Aid drinkers who prefer go-along-to-get-along government – the wrong way.

He’s also the PREA’s worst nightmare: somebody who thinks for himself and isn’t easily intimidated.

Eggemann sounds uncompromising in his demand for higher measurable student achievement, and unabashedly dismissive of the District’s nonsensical “teaching the whole child” instead of “teaching to the [standardized] tests” alibi for its low rankings. Even more notably, he is the only candidate demanding complete transparency from the District and the Board – including dragging the teacher contract negotiations out of the closet and into the sunlight, where the taxpayers and the media alike can see and hear not only the PREA’s demands but also the District’s responses.

Not surprisingly, two of Eggemann’s opponents are PREA sock puppets.

Bublitz is a former teacher and current School District 63 administrator. And for good measure, his wife is a D-64 teacher and PREA member, which would appear to create both a conflict of interest and an appearance of impropriety in dealing with any systemic teacher issues. Bublitz is so much the PREA’s boy that its president, Andy Duerkop, didn’t hesitate to admit that the PREA recruited Bublitz to replace departing two-term PREA cabana boy/beyatch John Heyde, who engineered the current sweetheart contract for the PREA back in 2012.

According to Duerkop, Sotos also sought PREA support. So when a successful challenge got Bublitz’s running mate, Kristin Gruss, tossed off the ballot, the PREA adopted Sotos as its unofficial Plan B. Which is why you’ll see his and Bublitz’s signs paired up in front yards all over town, except where some sly devils have placed Bublitz’s sign on one lot line and Sotos’ sign on the opposite lot line to make it look like they’re on different properties altogether.

Busted.

While we are tempted to suggest that voters tired of the D-64 same old same old might want to consider giving Eggemann the “bullet” – i.e., voting only for him rather than diluting that vote with votes for his competition – we believe Tony Borrelli deserves another shot at proving he can be the kind of thoughtful and courageous people’s representative we endorsed back in April 2011.

On one hand, Borrelli has delivered for the taxpayers on a number of occasions during his first term – like with his “no” vote on the current teacher contract, his “yes” vote for residency checks, his “yes” vote for videotaping Board meetings. But seemingly just as frequently, he has stiffed those same taxpayers with his “yes” votes on “free” Chromebooks, on a sweetheart contract for newly-minted Supt. Heinz, and an even more ridiculous contract extension for business manager Becky Allard.

And most importantly of all, the educational performance of D-64 students seems dead in the water.

Assuming Dathan Paterno pulls his head out of his anti-Common Core whatsit and actually starts representing all those taxpayers who aren’t afflicted with obsessive/compulsive right-wing ideological pathology but who, instead, just want the educational quality they’re paying so dearly for, a Borrelli/Paterno/Eggemann alliance might be able to inspire some independent thought and civic-mindedness from a cipher like Bob Johnson.

And without a Heyde on the Board for the first time in a dozen years, maybe even a blind squirrel like Vicki Lee might find an occasional acorn.

But the first step is electing Eggemann and re-electing Borrelli.

To read or post comments, click on title.

In two posts back in November and December we had some choice words for some of our elected representatives on the Park Ridge-Niles District 64 School Board who were looking down their noses at the idea of checking into whether all kids attending D-64 schools – and getting $14,000/year per kid educations for free, courtesy of Park Ridge taxpayers – actually resided in the District.

So we felt pleased and somewhat vindicated to read yesterday’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate article reporting that this past Monday (Feb. 9) night the D-64 Board voted to conduct residency checks for all students enrolled for the 2015-16 school year (“District 64 Board approves annual residency checks,” Feb. 10).

And we have to give Supt. Laurie Heinz props for coming up with three options for the residency checks: Option A, with checks every three years; Option B, with families checked every year via in-person presentation of residency documentation; and Option C, being the same as Option B but with residency documents simply being sent in.

While we prefer Option B, any of the three would be better than the Swiss-cheese residency check system that’s currently in place and that actually might be allowing people who owned a home in Park Ridge five or even ten years ago to continue to send their kids to D-64 schools even if they sold that home and moved to Niles, Des Plaines, or Edison Park.

But nothing ever seems to be an unqualified “win,” much less a “win-win,” for either the students or the taxpayers at D-64.

So when Board member John Heyde and his coat-holding acolyte, Scott Zimmerman, once again objected to any residency checks as being “too burdensome” for residents, Heinz immediately scrambled for a “compromise” to mollify them. And consistent with the view that compromise produces a camel when what you really need is a thoroughbred, Heinz’s compromise was Option A (an every-three year check) but applied to only half of District families!

Seriously.

Fortunately, Board president Tony Borrelli and members Dan Collins, Bob Johnson, Dathan Paterno and Vicki Lee resisted getting sucked down that rabbit hole into Heyde’s and Zimm’s own special non-accountability wonderland; and that absurd compromise was defeated 5-2.

But it sounds as if the residency check for this coming school year will be a “trial” – with the expectation that if the first year’s check doesn’t disclose a significant enough number of scofflaws, the Board would cancel the residency checks for future years. What that “significant enough” number might be, however, apparently was not discussed by a Board and administration that historically treats concrete, measurable performance goals like plague-ridden rats.

Considering that each scofflaw student represents $14,000 of cost, however, just three or four scofflaws could cover the cost of one relatively “junior” D-64 teacher – assuming the Board and Administration don’t come up with ways to seriously dilute those savings by heavily padding the costs of conducting the checks.

The two most notable Board member comments on that issue, based on the H-A article, were from Collins and Paterno.

Collins, who has two children in District schools and who was the only Board member to vote against “free” (i.e., taxpayer-paid) Chromebooks, apparently went beyond his own personal opinion and made the effort to talk to District parents about the annual residency checks. And he reported – not surprisingly to us – that everyone he talked to thought annual checks were “a great idea.”

We’re betting he would have received an even more ringing endorsement from those District taxpayers without kids in D-64 schools who just pay the bills.

Paterno, on the other hand, reportedly dismissed the checks thusly: “We should at least do it once, and if we don’t catch anybody, we’d know it was a waste of time.” Kind of like the DEA raiding a suspected drug house once, finding no drugs, and never checking it again.

With that kind of attitude (reportedly joined in by Vicki Lee) combined with Heyde’s and Zimm’s outright opposition to residency checks, it sounds like a majority of the D-64 Board might be engineering the “trial” for failure and sabotaging it right from the get-go.

And, not surprisingly, according to the H-A article the Board didn’t even specify whether the District will use Option B or Option C.  That left filling that decision-making void to D-64 Public Information Coordinator (a/k/a, Propaganda Minister) Bernadette Tramm, who reportedly confirmed to Pioneer Press that the Board is leaving those kinds of details up to “the district administration.”

Big mistake, or bad idea?

Unless a few Board members grow spines pretty quickly and force the bureaucrats to put in place a transparent, clearly-understandable residency check process with specifically measurable goals, the one-year “trial” might very well be both.

To read or post comments, click on title.

How many of you know about or remember Park Ridge-Niles School District 64’s current “five-year plan” – “A Journey of Excellence” – to accelerate the use of technology from 2010 to 2015? If you don’t, there’s no need to get your undies in a bunch, because it is expiring this year.

We’ve written about “A Journey of Excellence” and what appears to be its lack of meaningful academic achievement in the past, including in our 05.15.09, 09.16.09, 06.06.11, 09.08.14 and 09.18.14 posts.  We’ve noted how D-64 keeps getting away with spending hundreds of millions of our tax dollars doing what legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden always discouraged with the warning “Don’t mistake activity for achievement.”

But if you have a perverse fascination for trying to figure out how D-64 keeps getting away with it, you might actually enjoy D-64’s website history of the expiring “Journey” – starting with the “4-page PDF list including Action Plans” (with its page 2 commitment that “Student performance on the…(ISATs) will always compare favorably with other high-achieving districts”) and the colorful “Strategic Plan Implementation Schedule 2012-13”.

Not surprisingly, we couldn’t find any reports, presentations, news releases, or any other form of communication on that “Strategic Plan” webpage – the latest of which is dated April 22, 2013 – that actually shows, or even talks about, how D-64’s ISATs “compare favorably with other high-achieving districts.” In fact, we Googled for a solid 20 minutes and could not come up with one instance of D-64’s Board or administration providing any objective and/or numerical comparisons of D-64 ISATs that demonstrate favorable comparisons with other “high-achieving districts.”

That’s because D-64 has learned that dangling the carrot of increased achievement is a great marketing tool for convincing wishful parents and gullible taxpayers that there really are silver bullets for achieving academic excellence; and that D-64 has come up with them through its latest five-year plan. And once that convincing has occurred, making sure those parents and taxpayers don’t realize they’ve been snookered is the key to D-64’s ability to dangle another carrot in front of them five years later.

Which is what it’s doing with the announcement that it is forming a 30-35 member “Strategic Planning Steering Committee” to help the District create a new five-year plan that will “identify the most important challenges District 64 will need to address in the next five years, and how the District might go about planning for those challenges,” according to Supt. Laurie Heinz.

For those of you who have been through these goat rodeos before, you won’t be surprised to read such cliches as “community-driven strategic planning process” that will involve “a wide range of community stakeholders” and allow “all stakeholders…to contribute their ideas and vision” by…wait for it…”completing a survey or participating in a focus group.”

What would one of these rodeos be without stakeholders, surveys and focus groups?

And just for good measure, the committee “will be guided by a highly experienced, outside facilitator” who will be paid a sizable chunk of our tax dollars to make sure all the goats get herded in exactly the direction the D-64 administration and the Park Ridge Education Association (“PREA,” a/k/a the teachers union) want them to go.

It won’t be as impressive as John Wayne surveying a herd of steers and saying “Take ’em to Missouri, Matt,” but it’s likely to be as close as you’re going to get with goats and government.

At the risk (albeit a minute one) of taking away all the fun, expense and faux suspense of this strategic planning goat rodeo, however, we offer the following “challenges” D-64 will need to address within the next five years:

1.  Improving the quality of D-64 education so that student performance and other measurable values actually provide a formidable incentive to our higher-achieving and more demanding current residents to stay here rather than to emigrate to Glenview, Northbrook, Northfield, Wilmette, etc. for their better-scoring school districts; and a formidable incentive for such achieving/demanding non-residents to relocate to Park Ridge instead of to Glenview, Northbrook, et al.

2.  Negotiating a taxpayer-focused collective bargaining agreement with the PREA in 2016 that ends automatic annual raises to teachers for no improved student performance. During the five years of “A Journey of Excellence,” base teacher salaries have increased a total of 11% (not counting “step” and “lane” increases, or any “spikes” for soon-to-retire teachers in order to juice-up pensions) while student achievement based on ISATs appears to have been flat or declined in comparison to “high-achieving districts.”

3.  Convincing folks whose kids have finished using D-64 (and D-207) education that such education will continue to improve and provide an increasing cost-benefit value that will ensure continued appreciation of their home value, thereby discouraging the economic death spiral of current/imminent net-payers selling their homes to current/imminent net-users – the former of whom pay roughly $4,000 of RE taxes to D-64 while the latter of whom pay that same $4,000 but take out $14,000 per kid of “free” education.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for D-64’s Board, administration, or any “highly experienced outside facilitator” to focus on these kinds of “challenges.” They’ll be too busy trying to herd the goats into the pen they’ve already chosen for the next five years.

Just as soon as they declare the most recent five-year plan a shining success simply because it put an iPad or Chromebook in every kid’s hands.

To read or post comments, click on title.

In our November 28 post we wrote about how Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 had finally figured out that it might be giving away hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars by not confirming that every student receiving a free D-64 education actually lived in the District.

But while it is gratifying to read that the School Board might actually be trying to finally address that problem, a recent Park Ridge Herald-Advocate story (“District 64 considers further residency requirement changes,” Dec. 19) raises new questions about D-64’s ability to be competent stewards of the taxpayers’ money that leave us scratching our heads and reminding ourselves of manager Casey Stengel’s indictment of his own New York Mets back in 1962:

“Can’t anybody here play this game?” 

At the School Board’s December 15 meeting, Board member Dan Collins – the only one with the integrity and fiscal responsibility to have argued against free (i.e., at the taxpayers’ expense instead of the parents’) Chromebooks even though his household would receive two of them worth over $600 – argued for residency checks for every grade instead of just at enrollment, and again at entering third and sixth grades. 

But this Board apparently is still driving under the influence of its senior – and most fiscally irresponsible – member, John Heyde. Consequently, it is continuing to look for plausible ways not to require annual residency checks for kids whose parents expect $14,000 (or $28,000, or $42,000, depending on number of kids in District schools) of free D-64 education. 

Not surprisingly, Heyde is appalled that parents might have to endure what he has called the “pain in the neck” of proving their kids’ residency on an annual basis when, instead, he can simply dump any additional financial burdens of educating kids who don’t live in the District on its beleaguered taxpayers. 

We suggested a no-cost way of doing the residency checks in that 11.28.14 post. But anything that won’t stiff the taxpayers or enrich public employees, preferably at the same time, is rarely (if ever) to Heyde’s liking. So with no shortage of encouragement from Heyde, the Board is having a cost-benefit analysis done, presumably one that will predict a boatload of expense for a mere bucket-full of savings. That’s usually the way these kinds of things are done.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, D-64 is looking to make it even easier for non-resident kids to get a free D-64 education.

The Board is thinking about letting kids who don’t actually live in the District – but whose families are allegedly in the process of building or renovating homes in the District – attend District schools for free for the 18 months prior to the construction/renovation being completed.

The current policy is that kids can start D-64 schools only 60 days before occupancy, although we have no idea what happens if the kid starts school and then the family doesn’t move into their new/newly-renovated home. Given the currently inept state of residency non-checks, however, we suspect the kid could be going to D-64 schools for years while living in Edison Park, Norridge, Des Plaines, etc.

But where the real mental breakdown occurs is in what passes for the thought process of the Board members when it comes to the traditional benchmark qualification for free education: the concept of “residency.” Either kids live in the District or they don’t.

What benefit to the existing District taxpayers is achieved by letting kids who don’t live in the District attend District schools FOR FREE for 18 months?

According to Board member Scott Zimmerman (Heyde’s very own “Mini-Me”), free non-resident education should be extended for at least 18 months, and even up to 24 months, before residency actually occurs.

Why?

Zimm blames the slow speed of construction in Park Ridge!  And if that’s not dumb enough for you, try this one: “These people…are building homes and increasing property values in the district. I’d like to encourage that.”

There you have it, folks…further proof that Mark Twain was right when he said: “God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.”

Not content to have bungled his assigned task of making sure D-64 is producing the very best educational value for its students and its taxpayers in return for the high taxes we already pay to D-64, Zimmerman is now trying to play economist by shifting his attention to faux-stimulating the local real estate market through giving away as much as $28,000 per kid of D-64 education to NON-RESIDENTS whose parents already are committed to building/renovating a Park Ridge home!

Zimm could have lifted that bright idea right out of a scene from the movie “Dave.”

And it may have inspired fellow Board member Dathan Paterno to chime in with the equally goofy observation: “As long as they’re paying taxes on the property, they’re putting money into the system.”

By that kind of un-reasoning, should a Chicago family living in Norwood Park that owns a Park Ridge condo it rents out for $1,000/month to a senior citizen be able to send their kids to D-64 schools because they are “paying taxes on the property” and “putting money into the system”?

Chalk that up as just another sick joke on the taxpayers passing for stewarsdship from our elected representatives on the D-64 Board – one they are supposed to be voting on at their January 26 meeting, along with whether to do residency checks on the kids of homeowners more frequently than just at the time of initial enrollment.

If your sense of humor runs to the twisted and absurd, feel free to “Ha! Hah!! Hah!!!” Or, given the season, “Ho! Ho!! Ho!!!”

But if you’re a D-64 taxpayer, you’re still getting coal.

To read or make comments, click on title.