Memo to Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District 64 Board members John Heyde, Ron James, Marty Joyce, Chris Mollet, Sue Runyon, Ted Smart and Genie Taddeo: Why do you need to enlist help from our community’s “key communicators” to win support for your plan to add more than $700,000 a year in new personnel, including more administrators? 

As reported in last week’s Herald-Advocate (“District 64 invites public to discuss new staff additions,” March 27), District 64 has invited certain select individuals – including members of last year’s referendum committee and other District 64-affiliated groups – to attend a “Power Point presentation” (a/k/a, a dog-and-pony show) by Supt. Sally Pryor about this new personnel plan this Wednesday, April 2, so that those “key communicators” can, in turn, “spread the word” to the community about what a great idea this is.

But if this is such a great idea, we would expect its benefits to be pretty self-evident from whatever information persuaded you board members.  So why not simply publish that information on the District’s website where the general public could read it?  And even if this plan needs some explanation, aren’t all of you Board members who seem to endorse it, or Supt. Pryor who helped devise it, capable of providing that explanation without recruiting mouthpieces from the ranks of the same folks who helped you sell the big tax increase referendum to the voters a year ago?   

Yes, we know that other members of the public are also “welcome to attend” this meeting, so long as they RSVP (by calling 847.318.4300) before showing up.  But the use of invitations sends a pretty clear message about who you want at this meeting.   

If you really wanted to know what the community thinks about spending almost three-quarters of a million dollars annually on new personnel, you should have sought public input for the idea months ago – before Staff even put this plan together – rather than after you devised it, announced it, and began catching the flak you should have expected given how, only a year ago, you were assuring the voters that the extra revenues from the tax increases would not be used for new personnel. 

Instead of packing a room with cheerleaders and passing out the Kool-Aid, why not hold a truly “open” meeting and, for starters, address the issues raised by Robert Smith in his March 13, 2008, letter to the editor of the Herald-Advocate (“Promises didn’t include more positions”)?  If you tried asking the public about what you want to do before deciding on it, maybe you wouldn’t have to recruit others to “sell” the public on it.