If you are a responsible homeowner, chances are you have a reasonably good idea of the condition of your house, especially if you have lived in it for awhile.

You know, for example, approximately how old your roof is and whether it’s leaking or not.  You pretty much know whether your furnace is on its last legs, and whether your air conditioner should make it through another summer.  And if your windows need replacement because they’re still single-pane and the wind blowing through the sash tickles the curtains. 

Given the knowledge the ordinary homeowner has about the house he/she owns, the comment Park Ridge-Niles School Dist.64 president John Heyde made at this past Monday night ‘s (Sept. 12) meeting about the condition of the District’s buildings was, in a word, stunning.

As reported in a Park Ridge Herald-Advocate story by Tracy Gruen (“District 64 consultant to finish building needs study half-year early,” Sept. 13), during a “Roles, Goals and Controls” workshop run by representatives of D-64’s new architect-of-record, Fanning Howey Associates (“FHA”), Mr. Heyde – in response to ongoing demands by Carpenter and Field school parents for air conditioning at those schools – explained his board’s refusal to put A/C at the top of the project priority list:

“I don’t want to advance those projects to the front of the line only to find out there’s a roof that’s going to collapse somewhere.”

We’re going to give Mr. Heyde a couple of hyperbole points, if only because even we can’t quite force ourselves to believe such a Chicken Little comment was entirely serious.  

But unless it was utter nonsense, the thought that all those well-paid administrators and the seven people whom we’ve elected to be stewards of this community’s elementary education – which includes the condition of all the District’s school buildings – might not know with reasonable certainty the condition of those structures is troubling.  And even the merest suspicion that a dangerous condition might exist is just plain irresponsible.

We’ve been critical of D-64’s board and administration for figuratively fiddling while the District’s standardized test scores and other objective measures of achievement burn.  And we’ve been critical of the overcompensation of the District’s teachers and administrators, given the money the District spends on what appears by objective measures to be mediocre student achievement, despite all the subjective accolades and back-patting in which the District specializes. 

The science and art of educating children, however, is a far more complex endeavor than simply keeping tabs on the condition of buildings.  So we have to wonder just how clueless or outright negligent those administrators and school board members have been about repair and maintenance of those buildings over the past 5-10 years that Mr. Heyde might even think about something like a roof collapse? 

During that entire time period the District’s architect-of-record was the supposedly well-regarded Green Associates, which was brought in back in 1996 to help then-Supt. Fred Schroeder stampede gullible voters into replacing what was then the District’s newest school building, the “old” Emerson Junior High, with the “new” Emerson Middle Schoo; and to adopt the then-newly fashionable middle-school model of elementary education.  Almost 15 years later, neither that building nor that model appears to have measurably improved the quality of education, despite the $20 million-plus it cost the taxpayers.  

So why wasn’t the District using Green Associates’ services to keep abreast of the condition of all its facilities during that time?  Could it be that the board and the administration didn’t want to know about any facilities issues that might demand the expenditure of funds those school officials preferred spending on other things?

As we wrote in our post “D-64 Board Stealthily Picks Architect Of Record” (05.13.11), FHA seems to have been brought in as much for its referendum-facilitating expertise as for its architecture and engineering ability – not unlike Green Associates 15 years ago.  And from the looks and sounds of things so far, that’s exactly the direction in which this particular train is heading, with Heyde talking about roof collapses; his right-hand man, board vice-president Scott Zimmerman, claiming he wants to “understand the use of real estate across the district”; and FHA promoting the need to create “21^st century spaces” for students. 

As the notorious Illinois Secretary of State Paul Powell used to say, gleefully: “I can smell the meat a-cookin’.”

So can we, and it smells like a major (and expensive) facility repair, maintenance and renovation “master plan” that will be pushed with a crisis-like sense of urgency – but not until that “master plan” is presented in June 2013.  And those of you who have been paying attention might notice that June 2013 just happens to be about a year after the taxpayers’ representatives (chortle, chortle) on the school board will have conspired with the former teachers union members/now administrators to give the teachers another expectedly-sweet new multi-year contract.

Isn’t that an interesting coincidence?