Beginning at 6:00 p.m. tonight the Board of the Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 will interview 8 applicants to fill the seat recently vacated by former Board member Terry Cameron.
The original field consisted of 12 applicants, although D-64 has not explained why or how that field was reduced to the final 8: Vicki Loise, Kristin Gruss, Jennifer Kuzminski, Kimberly Miller, Patrick Moon, Holly Schneider, Katherine Ranalli, and Robert Johnson. Their names are, literally, all we know about them, even though the interviews are only 4 hours from kick-off.
Why?
Because despite all sorts of claims to the contrary, D-64 remains the closest thing to a secret society among any of our four local governmental bodies – thanks in large part to its minister of disinformation and propaganda, Bernadette Tramm, and a complicit School Board that seems to equate anything less than a total information blackout with crystal-clear, well-lit transparency.
How did we find out the names of these finalists? Not from the D-64 website but from a story that was published in the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate at 11:40 this morning – “District 64 School Board conducting open meeting to select new member” – barely more than six hours in advance of the meeting at which those 8 finalists will be interviewed in what D-64 is billing as a “public” hearing.
Except that the only “public” part of it will be the applicant interviews themselves.
Once those are over, the six remaining Board members will disappear into…wait for it…closed session “to deliberate and possibly select the new board member,” according to the H-A article. Secret deliberations are the way D-64 has always rolled.
That’s where the horse-trading and deal-making will go on, well beyond the eyes and ears of the taxpayers and the press who should be entitled to see and hear, either in person or on videotape, every last word of those deliberations – because the person getting Cameron’s old seat will be getting a free pass from the kind of public scrutiny an actual candidate for that office, including Cameron, endures during the course of a normal political campaign. The press and those taxpayers also should get to hear all the reasons for and against each candidate, and get to know which reasons came from which of the six board members.
But D-64 is Chinatown, Jake. It doesn’t operate out in the open.
In fact, D-64 so revels in its culture of secrecy that, as of 2:00 p.m. today, we still couldn’t find any of the applications for those 8 finalists – or the 4 applicants who mysteriously dropped (or were dropped) out of the running – either on the D-64 website or on the H-A website. So much for any members of the public or the press being able to show up at 164 South Prospect at 6:00 p.m. with even the barest minimum of information from those applications or from the applicants’ answers to three questions which reportedly were sent to them on July 1 and were due back to the District by 6:00 p.m. on July 5, right smack in the middle of the 3-day 4th of July holiday weekend.
The questions:
1. What do you perceive to be the most pressing challenge that District 64 faces and what ideas or strengths would you bring to the Board, if appointed?
2. Additionally, what do you feel is a particular strength of the District and why?
3. Should you be selected, how have you or will you prepare for this position?
Frankly, we’re not impressed with the breadth or the depth of these questions, which seem like they were thrown together between a trip to the grocery store and the beginning of a World Cup game. We also have to wonder how much more insight into the candidates’ knowledge, views and philosophy of public education can be gained in the scheduled 15-minute interviews, given the shallowness of these initial inquiries and the cumulative 500-word limitation on the answers to all three questions.
But in the end we suspect that, like so many of the ostensibly “public” things D-64 does, those interviews will be more for show than for dough. The really important stuff will take place where those taxpayers who contribute one-third of their property taxes each year to D-64 won’t get to see or hear it.
Behind closed doors.
UPDATE (07.09.14) D-64 reports that its Board has selected Robert Johnson of Park Ridge to fill the Terry Cameron vacancy.
Johnson has an undergraduate degree from the University of Notre Dame and an MBA from the University of Chicago’s Booth School. He is a senior vice president at Northern Trust who manages relationships with non-profit organizations, including universities, foundations and endowments. He is the father of an Emerson 8th grader and two D-64 graduates, and previously served on the elected board of a Chicago parochial school.
More information can be found at: http://www.d64.org/news/District-64-Board-of-Education-to-Appoint-Robert-Johnson-to-Vacant-Seat.cfm
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