One of the many pleasures of the holiday season is the proliferation of holiday movies.

We try not to miss Frank Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life,” the gold standard of Christmas movies and currently No. 20 on the AFI Top 100 list. We can’t help but chuckle when Clarence orders “mulled wine, heavy on the cinnamon and light on the cloves” from the Pottersville version of Nick the bartender, and try as we might we can’t keep from getting misty every time those good folks of Bedford Falls come up big to save George and the Bailey Bros. Building & Loan from prison and ruin.

But running a close second in our book is 1942’s “Holiday Inn.”

The combination of Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Marjorie Reynolds and an original Irving Berlin score that debuted the iconic “White Christmas” is tough to beat. And “Holiday Inn” contains more top-shelf Berlin tunes than just “White Christmas,” one of our favorites being Crosby’s Thanksgiving number called “I’ve Got Plenty To Be Thankful For.” 

That’s the way we felt yesterday after reading “District 64 considers changing residency verification policy” (November 25) in this week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate, and realizing how the Park Ridge-Niles District 64 School Board – and long-time Board member John Heyde in particular – keeps providing one object lesson after another on how a local governmental body can spend more and more tax dollars running an underachieving school system.

According to the H-A article, D-64 finally got the bright idea that it might be giving away $14,000 of its taxpayers’ hard-earned money on each student who is not actually living in the District and whose parents aren’t paying property taxes, either directly as homeowners or indirectly as renters.

Not surprisingly, however, D-64 didn’t come up with this bright idea on its own.

It had to borrow it from Maine Twp. High School Dist. 207, which decided several years ago that ferretting out all those non-resident students and their…wait for it…parasite parents who were helping themselves to free $17,000/year D-207 educations was well worth the cost of doing so.

According to D-64’s overpaid (at around $220,000/year, not counting every bennie) finance superintendent, Rebecca Allard, students whose parents own an in-district residence (house, townhouse or condo) have their residency checked only once: when those students are initially enrolled. So if a family packs up and moves out of the District, its kindergarten –aged student could remain enrolled in D-64 schools without the parents paying any taxes toward the $14,000 per-student annual cost until the student graduated middle school as much as 8 years later.

Total cost to the District’s taxpayers for such a grades 1-8 scam: a whopping $112,000. Per student.

Because D-64 hasn’t been checking the residency of students from purported Park Ridge homeowners other than at enrollment, we’d bet dollars to donuts that these kinds of scams have been run to the detriment of D-64 taxpayers for years, perhaps costing millions of dollars.

And even though the residency of students of renter families is reportedly checked annually, that still might not provide all that much more fiscal integrity.

That’s because for years there have been rumors of families from Chicago’s northwest side neighborhoods renting one bedroom condos in Bristol Court, Park Ridge Pointe, or smaller multi-family developments for between $12,000-$18,000/year just to establish an in-district address so they can get $28,000 (for 2 students) or $42,000 (for 3 students) of D-64 education – or from $34,000 to $51,000 of D-207 education – rather than sending their kids to Ebinger. Norwood Park, Taft, or paying private school tuition.

With that much money on the line one would think that, once the D-64 Board members understood how much taxpayer money they might be losing, they would get right after implementing a solution to this problem. Like maybe adopting D-207’s policy of checking every student’s residency every year.

But one would be wrong.

The overpaid Allard, while explaining a process like the one used by D-207, immediately disparaged it by pointing out how “labor-intensive” it would be, noting all the overtime that would have to be paid to District employees.

But Allard’s reluctance is nothing compared to that of our elected D-64 Board members who are supposed to be keeping an eye on spendthrift bureaucrats, incompetent teachers, and the overall cost-effectiveness of how our property taxes are being used in the interest of education.

Both Board President Tony Borrelli and member Vicki Lee seem to be looking for some kind of on-line way of avoiding the in-person show-up process that D-207’s Supt. Ken Wallace claims is most effective in catching violators.

But leave it to Heyde to show, once again, how little respect he has for the taxpayers who educated his own kids and who provide all those tax dollars that he has been throwing at underperforming teachers and administrators alike.

Heyde not only echoed the overpaid Allard’s concern about employee overtime, but he went her one better by whining about the inconvenience of a D-207-like process to D-64 parents:

“What District 207 is doing is a pain in the neck for parents. My question would be – do we think we’re going to find enough kids who don’t belong in our schools that it’s worth the burden on the families? Not to mention the cost to the taxpayers in terms of overtime.”

In other words, it’s the convenience of D-64 parents – who already are getting around a 200% return on the D-64 portion of their property taxes for just their first D-64 student, and who are getting an extra 300% return for each additional D-64 student – that is more important to the sensitive Heyde (and to Lee and Borrelli?) than whether the taxpayers are getting ripped off by non-resident parasites who have no qualms about scamming FREE D-64 educations for their kids.

Since the overpaid Allard and the sensitive-spendthrift Heyde can’t seem to figure this out on their own, we’ll offer this suggestion to alleviate any concerns about the cost of employee overtime in this residency-check process:

Instead of paying employees to do these basically clerical residency checks, how about recruiting all those PTO-member volunteers who devote scores of hours to saving $10-20,000 a year on photocopying and clerical costs, or who spend hundreds of hours planning and staging variety shows to raise similar bucks?  Then the cost of the checks would be virtually nothing.

Fortunately, all reports are that the overpaid Allard will be riding off into retirement and her guaranteed six-figure-pension in June 2015.

Unfortunately, we haven’t heard any similar report about whether the sensitive-spendthrift will try for another four years of dis-serving D-64 students and disrespecting D-64 taxpayers. And since another teachers union contract negotiation is coming up in 2016, we can see how Heyde might want to stick around for at least a couple more years to negotiate one last sweetheart contract that meets or exceeds the one he and then-fellow Board negotiator Pat “One-and-Done” Fioretto pushed through 3 years ago.

The only silver lining to this latest tale of D-64 Board buffoonery is that Board member Dathan Paterno appears to have climbed off his anti-Common Core bandwagon long enough to actually make some salient observations about the need for much better residency oversight, to wit: “If we can dissuade others from [stealing D-64 educations]…at a certain point, we won’t need to do this.”

Let’s hope so, although parasites are extremely difficult to dissuade – as the Library species, and the number and ferocity of its defenders, already have demonstrated.

But if this effort is successful, maybe then the D-64 Board can start figuring out how to provide the kind of educational quality and measurable performance that comes a lot closer to matching what D-64 taxpayers are being forced to finance.

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