Only a few weeks ago we wrote a post about how it sounded like the School Board of Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 was cooking up a contract extension and raise for rookie superintendent Laurie Heinz (“D-64 Supt. Contract Extension Just Another Non-Transparent Charade?”, May 31), all while hiding from the taxpayers their discussions of Heinz’s first year’s performance and whatever justification there might be for these additional financial perks.

Since then, however, the Board has held two more meetings and two more closed sessions – in each instance using generic language (“specific employees”) in the closed-session motion that did not even identify Heinz or mention that they would be discussing her contract extension and/or compensation.

So it should come as no surprise – even as it should infuriate every D-64 taxpayer – that two agenda items for tonight’s (June 22) D-64 Board meeting are “Action Item 15-06-15” to extend Heinz’s contract for some unspecified period, and “Action Item 15-06-16” to approve some unspecified new compensation for her.  Nor could we find any description of the extension, the compensation, or the reason(s) for them on the District’s website.

In other words, not only has the D-64 Board conducted all its discussions of Heinz’s contract extension and compensation in “closed sessions” from which the taxpayers and the media are banned, but those Board members are now effectively spitting in the collective eye (the most polite metaphor we can think of) of those same taxpayers by not even revealing the details of both Action Items in advance of tonight’s meeting – the better to avoid any pre-meeting, pre-vote scrutiny, questions and/or complaints by the taxpayers who will, as always, be picking up the tab for this Board’s largesse.

At this juncture we should note a few important facts as context for the Board’s continuing insults: (1) D-64 spends about the same amount of money educating less than 5,000 students as the City of Park Ridge spends on all of the services it provides to over 37,000 residents; (2) Heinz already makes close to $250,000/year, all in, despite her having had no previous superintendent experience; and (3) as best as we can tell, Heinz has failed to move the needle of student/District achievement or rankings even one click upward during her first year on the job, unlike some professional sports rookie-of-the-year whose stellar performance earns a contract renegotiation.

So why is she getting new (presumably better) compensation and a contract extension beyond her original 3-year term?

If you guessed “for no reason that would pass the wink test, the smirk test, the LOL test or the LMAO test,” you’d be right. Which is why D-64 Board president Tony Borrelli has orchestrated this whole evaluation/extension/raise process in numerous closed sessions, rather than in open ones. And why perennial Board bobbleheads Scott Zimmerman, Dathan Paterno, Vicki Lee and Bob Johnson have served as Borrelli’s “Amen!” chorus for that effort.

To say that Borrelli’s and the Bobbleheads’ conduct in this regard is disappointing would be a gross understatement. Frankly, such secretive conduct about the District’s top administrator is reprehensible, as is such secretive conduct by every elected official who purports to represent the taxpayers of his/her respective governmental unit.  Unfortunately, these D-64 folks are adept (via the well-paid propaganda minister/spinmeistrix, Bernadette Tramm) at manipulating and bamboozling our sleepwalking local press, so the public rarely hears about the many ways it is being played by their “representatives.”

Borrelli’s got almost four full years remaining on his current term so, unless he has a St. Paul-style epiphany about the many errors of his ways very soon, we can expect more deals like this one for Heinz being cooked up outside the public’s view. And because all four of the Bobbleheads will be on the Board in 2016, there’s no telling what kind of damage they can do when it’s time to negotiate (a/k/a, ankle-grab) a new teachers union contract – especially with a  contractually-secure Heinz whispering sweet nothings in Borrelli’s and the Bobbleheads’ ears about how well the District is performing, and how a teacher strike would be nothing short of a nuclear disaster for the District, the community and, most of all, for its vulnerable children.

After all, Heinz has been laying the groundwork for that argument since she took over and began “signing” every piece of parent-directed correspondence: “For your children.”  Not just “for the children,” but “for your children.”

And you wonder why Tramm makes the big bucks?

The only sliver of good news is that newly-elected Board member Mark Eggemann has consistently voted against those closed sessions. And newly-elected Board member Tom Sotos has voted against most of them. While that’s better than monolithic 7-0 no-questions-asked votes for closed-door meetings, voting “no” isn’t such a profile in courage when you’re certain to be outvoted by more than 2-1.

Which is why it would appear that Eggemann’s and Sotos’ “Rubicon” moment has arrived.  As in “crossing the Rubicon”; i.e., taking a step that commits a person to a specific course of action, usually with significant risk and consequences.

Or to give it some local flavor, it could be called a “720 Garden” moment, in recognition of when the late Mayor Dave Schmidt – back in early 2008, when he was still just first-year Ald. Dave – exercised his legal rights under the Illinois Open Meetings Act (“IOMA”) to publicly disclose then-mayor Howard Frimark’s closed-door attempts to enlist the then-City Council majority in finagling the City’s purchase of the 720 Garden property for a new police station.

That 720 Garden moment earned Schmidt a purely-political, non-binding public “condemnation” from Frimark, five of the seven sitting aldermen, and City Clerk Betty Henneman. But it showed the voting public that Schmidt stood for those principles that would become his “HITA” mayoral campaign platform less than a year later: Honesty, Integrity, Transparency and Accountability.

And it showed how Frimark and his Council lackeys didn’t.

Although Eggemann and Sotos are even newer to their offices than Schmidt was to his when he faced his Rubicon moment, Borrelli and the Bobbleheads appear to be providing such a Rubicon opportunity now.

Is it too late for Eggemann and Sotos to stand up at tonight’s meeting and demand a deferral of the votes on both Heinz’s contract extension and her new compensation until the details of both can be published on the District’s website so the taxpayers can reasonably be informed about them at least a week before any vote?  Are Borrelli and the Bobbleheads so far gone that they can’t even feel any shame for their HITA-bereft secretive dealings and their affronts to those taxpayers?

We should find out in about eight more hours.

UPDATED (06.25.15) The video from Monday night’s meeting can be found at http://www.d64.org/boe/BOE-Video-6-22-15.cfm, and it’s truly a revelation of what the addition of two new Board members (Mark Eggemann and Tom Sotos) and the departure of one old Board member (John Heyde) can do to add Honesty, Integrity, Transparency and Accountability to even an intransigent institution like D-64.

But after taking in the discussion about Heinz’s contract extension and raise, starting at 3:59:45 and continuing to 4:21:30, we’ve got to wonder why they didn’t vote to give her a THREE YEAR EXTENSION! Seriously, we haven’t heard that much gushing about any individual local public employee in at least 20 years – even though it all appears to have been based on those closed-session discussions and on reports that do not seem to have been made public (and clearly weren’t in Monday night’s meeting materials).

And for pure entertainment value, make sure you catch the tap-dancing about going into closed session that starts at the beginning of the video and continues to approximately the 0:08:15 point of the video. They actually severed the three closed-session matters (that they always used to vote on together) and conducted separate votes on them.

Gee, we wonder where they got THAT idea?

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