Late last week a “blast” e-mail went out from School District 64 Supt. Philip Bender that included the following bullet-point:

• I am pleased to announce that District 64 is now videotaping Board of Education meetings.   The videotaping is one of the ways the Board is enhancing the transparency of its operations and engaging stakeholders.  It also meets our Strategic Plan goal of accelerating the use of advanced technology.  Beginning with the August 22 meetings, the full-length videos can be viewed by selecting the meeting link on our website: http://www.d64.org/subsite/dist/page/board-education-meetings-984

To listen to that bit of propaganda, one would think that Bender and the School District 64 Board were in the forefront of promoting transparency and accountability of D-64 activities.

But as recently as the July 11th board meeting, Board member Scott Zimmerman – sounding clueless about the Illinois Open Meetings Act – branded the videotaping of meetings as “against school board policy,” while Bender insisted that he would need an opinion from the District’s legal counsel because he was “extremely uncomfortable that someone could manipulate and edit the video.”  With only newbie board member Anthony Borrelli speaking in favor of videotaping, it looked like it would be buried “in committee” for several months, if not longer.

Enter Marshall Warren and several other citizen activists (including Char Foss-Eggemann and Susan Sweeney), who showed up at the Board’s August 8th meeting with video camera in hand and videotaped that meeting on their own, uploading the video to a YouTube site appropriately labeled “sunshine4d64.”

As if by magic, the District had its own video camera up and running at the very next (August 22nd) meeting – and almost immediately its propaganda machine began shamelessly spinning the “transparency” credit away from the citizens and towards the District’s administration, as if videotaping were its idea all along.

The shameless deception can only be appreciated in light of the fact that even the TribLocal story dated August 26, 2011, carried the headline “Prodded by parents, District 64’s school board begins recording meetings,” and noted that, even after videotaping had been requested, “the district didn’t budge.”

For the time being, Warren et al. are planning to keep on videotaping while at the same time lobbying WOW to provide the camera and equipment for broadcasting D-64 meetings live as WOW recently did for Park Ridge City Council meetings.  And they should continue their own videotaping, given that the apathy and even outright antipathy D-64’s cast of characters (save for Borrelli) has displayed toward videotaping raises a possibility of some controversial segment of some future board meeting mysteriously disappearing into a “Rosemary Woods”-style, 17-minute gap.

Which brings us to the most important element of this videotaping saga: credibility.  Specifically, the credibility of D-64’s leadership.

If not for Warren and his merry band of activists, there is no way in H-E-double hockey sticks that D-64 would be videotaping its meetings – just like there was no way the City was going to videotape Council meetings until then-newly elected Park Ridge Mayor Dave Schmidt donated a video camera and recruited George Kirkland and Charles Melidosian, thereby proving that it didn’t cost anywhere near the $120,000 City Staff had budgeted to start videotaping City Council meetings.

What would it have taken for Bender and the D-64 Board to have prefaced their propaganda statement with the words “In response to the requests from members of this community…”?  Only the willingness to start playing it straight with the citizens who have made Bender and his fellow D-64’s administrators the 4th highest paid in the State of Illinois, and D-64’s teachers the 25th highest paid teaching staffs in the state – according to a May 31, 2011, study published in the Chicago Sun-Times – while the academic performance of D-64 students doesn’t begin to approach either of those two lofty rankings.

But apparently that kind of honesty is too much to ask, either from the bureaucrats themselves or from the public officials known as the School Board we have elected to make sure those bureaucrats keep their collective thumb off the scale, so to speak.

Which should make all of us wonder: If D-64’s administration and board can’t be trusted to tell the truth about something as simple and innocuous as videotaping meetings, how credible and forthright can they be expected to be when it comes to the really big issues, like the $70 million-plus 2011-12 budget that is scheduled for approval next month, or the upcoming teachers contract negotiations?

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