Last week we published another post about the Culture of Secrecy of the Board of Education over at Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 (“Secret Pay Raises At School District 64?” 06.30.11).  Since then, one of our readers – perturbed by the clandestine and fiscally-questionable way the D-64 Board and Administration conduct themselves – has brought some additional facts to our attention that deserve public airing.

The current teachers union contract with D-64, signed by Board president John Heyde and secretary Eric Uhlig on September 8, 2009, contains a couple of interesting benefits for the teachers that we don’t recall anybody on the Board (or anybody in the press, for that matter) publicizing during the negotiation and adoption of that contract. 

The first one, at Article VII, Section O, Paragraph 2(b), provides for the ratcheting-up of a teacher’s compensation by 6% annually during the last two years before retirement:

b.   Provide a salary increase for up to two (2) years prior to retirement in the next to last year of employment and the last year of employment …that is six percent (6%) above the teacher’s creditable earnings in the prior school year.  

That’s right, sports fans, our D-64 Board “negotiated” a guaranteed 12% home-stretch pay increase for imminent retiree teachers – the better to goose up those already-generous underfunded but guaranteed public pensions they’ll be drawing for 20+ and even 30+ years, thanks to retirement ages as early as 55 with the requisite service.  And with cost-of-living increases, of course!

And if that isn’t a nifty enough bon voyage bauble, get a load of what the contract provides at Paragraph 2(c) of that same Article and Section:

c.   Provide a service recognition payment as a post-retirement lump sum payment in the amount of $1,000 per year of service, not to exceed 25 years (i.e., $25,000) for any teacher who retires from the District [during the term of this Contract].

If we read that language correctly, teachers retiring from D-64 get a goodie bag of up to $25,000 when they walk out the door – $1,000 for each year of service.  Beats the heck out of a gold watch…even a Rolex…doesn’t it?

Crazier yet, we can find nothing in the contract that limits D-64’s obligation (meaning the obligation of us taxpayers) for these windfall payments only to those “service” years spent actually teaching in D-64 schools – a limitation that could have been locked down definitively by the simple inclusion of the words “to the District” after “per year of service” if our elected representatives on the Board (including the Harvard-educated, University of Chicago-trained attorney who serves as Board president) wanted to do so.

That the D-64 Board could unanimously (Heyde, Uhlig and their fellow then-Board members Sharon Lawson, Genie Taddeo, Pat Fioretto, Ted Smart and Russ Gentile) adopt such a contract is troubling, to say the least.  That it seems to have been done with little-to-no public debate and no invitation of citizen input by those Board members is appalling.

We also don’t recall any public debate over the compensation and stipend schedules contained in that contract: we heard about “2.5% increases” only after the deal was cut and the respective parties were crowing about how “fair” the deal was – something we criticized in our post “Concealing The Details Of A ‘Fair’ Contract Raises Questions” (09.14.09).  At the time, we thought that 2.5% per year looked pretty darn good…for the teachers.  In retrospect, it looks wonderful…for the teachers.  

And that’s why we can’t help but wonder, albeit perversely, just how many Park Ridge parents would be positively delighted if their own recent college graduates were making “minimum compensation” of $42,720 and health insurance for just a “Bachelor’s Degree and no experience”…with scheduled annual non-performance based raises…for approximately 8 months of actual work, with summers off…in a job that can’t be outsourced to Guadalajara or Bangalore…and from which one effectively can’t be fired once tenure is obtained after a few years on the job?

Again we are reminded of Mark Twain’s famous quote: “God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the school board.”

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