We used to think that Maine Township High School District 207 was a financially well-run organization, providing a high-quality education for the student and fiscal responsibility for the taxpayer.  But that belief was shaken by last week’s Herald-Advocate, which reported that Dist. 207 is facing a $17 million “structural budget deficit” (“District 207: Meetings to address $17M budget”). 

That article pointed us to a Dist. 207 “news release” [pdf], which tells a tale of woe that sure sounds like bad news for the District’s taxpayers.  According to two five-year financial forecasts, one done in-house and the other from an outside consultant, the District’s fund balances will be “depleted within five years if the District does not take decisive action to reduce or eliminate the structural budget deficit.”

Not surprisingly, the District reports that it will be looking at “formulating ways to increase revenues.”  For those of you not used to bureaucrat-speak, that means “coming up with a plan to raise taxes.”   But in typical school administration/school board obfuscation, the “news release” does not even mention the dreaded words “tax increase” – presumably because the administrators and school board members assume the taxpayers either are too stupid or too distracted by other matters to do the translation on their own.

If we are to believe the District (which is always an iffy proposition any time you’re dealing with government bureaucrats and politicians), the school board just found out this summer that an expected $4 million deficit for last school year was closer to $10 million! 

How do you end up that far off – 150% – and find out about it only after the end of the school year?  Wasn’t anybody monitoring those numbers during the school year itself?

If you want to ask some of those questions, we understand there is a meeting on the topic tomorrow night (Oct. 13) from 6:30 to 7:30 at Maine South; and next Monday night (Oct. 19) from 6:30 to 7:30 at Maine East.  Hopefully those won’t just be the typical dog-and-pony shows that are the rule rather than the exception when problems like this arise.

Meanwhile, we’ll just have to be content with the District’s two main alibis for this mess: that a “historically bad economy” (which is being used, at least for the time being, as the budgetary equivalent of “the dog ate my homework”); and that the low increase in the Consumer Price Index has caused a “flattening revenue line.”  In other words, because the increase in prices has been low, the District hasn’t been able to increase taxes as much as it has been increasing spending.

You know something is really cockamamie with a system that considers small increases in the cost of living a bad thing!

Do any of those administrators – or any of our purported “representatives” on the school board who are supposed to be keeping an eye on the administrators – have even the vaguest understanding of what kind of major disconnect between revenues and expenses they seem to be operating under? 

It sure doesn’t look that way, maybe because (as best as we can tell) none of those administrators or school board members appear to have any experience or understanding about running a $100 million a year business – which basically is what Dist. 207 is.  From what we can tell, most of them probably never ran any business at all, unless we count the occasional card-table sidewalk lemonade stand when they were six. 

According to the Dist. 207 bios for the seven school board members, three of them (McGrath, Mueller and Sullivan) are attorneys; two of them (Burk and Pellar) are former teachers; one of them (Braam) is an adjunct professor of psychology at Oakton Community College; and we can’t even tell what the seventh (Eric Leys) does for a living, although we are told he was named a “Master School Board Member” by the Illinois Association of School Boards.

According to the IASB website, however, it looks like that’s one of those titles you get just by going to enough IASB-sponsored events – kind of like earning frequent flier miles – so that excites us about as much as if Leys reported that he could now fly to Kansas City for free.

Business cluelessness could explain why (as the “news release” states) the “overall cost of salaries for all District employees, most of which are governed by a collective bargaining agreement, rose by about 5 percent this year.”  Gee, did anybody negotiating the last teachers’ contract on behalf of the District stop and think how they were going to ensure an increase in the revenue stream sufficient to cover that 5% increase in the cost of labor they were guarantying?

We didn’t think so. 

But, then again, what should we expect from teachers pretending to be business managers, and politicians pretending to be accountable for all the tax dollars they spend?

Update 10/13/09
Attached, courtesy of a reader who obtained it from The Champion website, is a purported list [pdf] of District 207 teachers (and administrators?) and their salaries.

We quickly counted 658 teachers/administrators, almost 300 of whom each appear to earn more than the reported median income for all Park Ridge households.