The pop quiz today has only one question: Name the two units of local government that, in the past two months, have rewarded their No. 1 bureaucrat for what appears to be average performance, at best?
If you answered “Park Ridge-Niles School Dist. 64 and Maine Twp. High School Dist. 207,” you’re a winner – even if, as a taxpayer, you might actually be more of a loser.
As we wrote about in several posts culminating in those of 07.01.15 and 07.06.15, the D-64 Board fell all over itself in unanimously voting to give rookie CEO/superintendent Laurie Heinz a one-year extension to her original three-year contract. That ensured that Heinz will be able to draw an additional $250,000+ from D-64 taxpayers despite not one shred of documentary evidence (or, at least, none that the D-64 Board chose to share with the taxpayers) of any significant improvement in D-64’s chronically lackluster student performance, as measured by objective statewide testing rather than D-64’s self-congratulatory navel gazing.
Three of the seven Board members (Mark Eggemann, Dathan Paterno and Tom Sotos) voted against giving Heinz an actual “raise” that we understand (because, of course, the details were not published) is worth between $10,000 and $20,000 – although, frankly, we don’t see the sense of giving away a $250,000+ contract extension but then denying a $10-20,000 raise.
Kind of like former Park Ridge alderman Don Bach’s (3rd) telling Bill Napleton back in January 2008 that the latter’s disrespect for Park Ridge ensured that Bach would never buy another $40,000 Cadillac from him – before voting to give Napleton up to $2.4 million of public dollars in environmental clean-up funding and sales-tax sharing revenues.
Not to be outdone by D-64’s drunken sailors, on July 16 the D-207 Board approved a one-year extension to the contract of superintendent Ken Wallace. This extension could push his pay up to $280,000 or more by the 2019-20 school year, once the built-in annual increases and available merit bonuses are included. And that also doesn’t count the additional thousands of dollars the District will pay to cover Wallace’s required pension contributions.
Besides paying premium prices for stagnant (or worse) performance, however, the other thing both school boards have in common is how they hid all the important discussions about Heinz’s and Wallace’s contract extensions and raises from the taxpayers through the BFF of every shameless and gutless politician: the closed session.
Frankly, there is no more effective and disrespectful way for our elected officials to trample transparency and accountability than by hiding in closed session – especially if all members of the governing body are co-conspirators who will make sure that, like Vegas, whatever happens in closed session stays in closed session. Although the Illinois Open Meetings Act does not require that closed session matters remain secret, not even one school board member has in the past two decades has displayed the integrity to publicly disclose closed-session proceedings the way then-ald. Dave Schmidt did by blowing the whistle on some kinky Council real estate maneuvering over the 720 Garden property back in 2008.
We’re still optimistic that D-64 newbie Eggemann, and maybe even newbie Sotos, might have their own “720 Garden Moment” over at D-64, hopefully sooner rather than later.
But we have no such hope for the Star Chamber that is the D-207 Board, where president Margaret McGrath leads a chorus of rubber-stampers – Sean Sullivan, Carla Owen, Paula Bessler, Mary Childers, Jin Lee and Teri Collins – in what has long been a pattern and practice of anti-transparency and un-accountability.
If you have any doubt about that, Exhibit A is the fact that while the City Council, the Park Board and the D-64 Board all post their meeting packets on-line prior to their meetings, the D-207 Board doesn’t. Heck, the D-207 Board lacks the basic honesty, integrity, transparency and accountability to post its meeting packets on the District’s website even AFTER the meetings.
Instead, all D-207 provides its taxpayers is an agenda like the one for the 06.09.15 Board meeting, which advised that there would be a “CLOSED SESSSION” involving the “Appointment, Employment, Compensation, Performance Discipline or Dismissal of Employees.”
Such a vague explanation is a pretty effective way of discouraging taxpayers from showing up and asking any tough questions.
If you watch the very end of Part I of the meeting video, you’ll see and hear the Board adjourn to closed session one hour into the meeting, or about 8:30 p.m.; and if you watch the beginning of Part II of the meeting video, you’ll see and hear the Board return from the closed session about an hour later.
What went on during that “secret” hour is anybody’s guess. But one can safely assume it had something to do with the events beginning at the 3:57 mark of Part 2, when Sullivan moves to give Wallace $51,000 of additional merit compensation for meeting both his “target goals” (whatever they are/were) and his “stretch target goals (whatever they are/were). And at the 5:03 mark, McGrath reads a statement in which she declares that Wallace had met all his performance goals, and does so with an almost-regal self-assurance that suggests it is “beyond contestation”:
We would not have been surprised to hear her tell any doubters to “go put that in your pipe and smoke it.” But as the room full of empty chairs confirms, there were no doubters – pipe-smokers or non – to be found at that point in the proceedings.
Watching that video and contemplating those proceedings gave us a major case of déjà vu, as it called to mind our 10.22.13 post in which we remarked how the D-207 Board was giving Wallace a 5-year contract extension for…er…um…we aren’t quite sure what – even as Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville was getting only a 3-year extension after winning his second Stanley Cup.
Silly us, comparing the leadership of an unaccountable, un-competitive bureaucracy to the leadership of a what-have-you-done-lately, highly-competitive business enterprise where objectively measurable results actually matter; and compensation is merit-based.
That dichotomy at least partially explains why D-64 and D-207 taxes keep going up while the ranking of D-207’s “flagship” school, Maine South, has slid solidly into the 20s from a decade ago when it was in, or close to, Illinois’ Top 10 – and D-64 school rankings rarely even crack the Top 50.
That makes us wonder how any sane D-207 Board member can justify these regular contract extensions and raises for Wallace.
And it makes us wonder even more about the sanity of those D-64 Board members who are paying Heinz almost as much as Wallace is getting, even though she’s managing less than 4,400 students compared to Wallace’s 6,400; and she oversees a budget of less than $80 million while Wallace manages a $160 million budget.
Meanwhile, you Park Ridge taxpayers with no kids in either district but whose home is one of, if not the, largest asset you own can wonder about just how much longer that “Park Ridge has GREAT schools” sales pitch can lure in new residents (and what kind of new residents they might be) when, year after year, the various school rankings show our schools firmly behind those in Glenview, Northbrook, Evanston, Arlington Hts., Buffalo Grove, Libertyville, Vernon Hills, Mt. Prospect, Deerfield, Highland Park, Lincolnshire.
How soon will it become commonplace for current residents – like the mother commenting on John Bennett’s August 2 post on the Park Ridge Citizens Online FB page – to shamelessly proclaim how they will be packing up and moving out of Park Ridge just as soon as their kids suck the last ounce of “free”/subsidized education out of their fellow Park Ridge taxpayers:
“We still pay the highest fees than almost every other higher class suburbs around. And still never got a clear answer on where the money goes. Everything they supposedly told us are things the PTO supposedly pays for. And the PTO gets alot of money through those directories, every hot lunch and slice of pizza they make money off of. But at least they stopped charging for Lunch supervision! Its total BS! I cannot wait until my youngest finishes Maine South, we are outta here.”
For those of you at all uncertain about our definition of the term “freeloader,” you’ve just read the embodiment of it.
That’s the kind of attitude that, if it proliferates, will create a downward spiral for this community – aided and abetted by feckless, fiscally-irresponsible elected officials whose idea of “transparency” is conspiring in secret with the bureaucrats they’re already overpaying with OPM.
Ours.
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