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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23 comments so far
Illinois just hired a new state school superintendent to oversee all the state’s public elementary and high schools, over 2 million kids, for $225,000 a year. So why are the D-64 and D-207 supts. getting more than him?
EDITOR’S NOTE: Because the entire D-207 Board, and a majority of the D-64 Board, are rubber stamps for anything “teacher” and “administrator.”
2014
In 2014, the illinois superintendent received a salary of $203,445, according to the Council of State Governments.
Tribune states that he will “initially get 225,000” not bad increase to this position from last year.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Not bad at all. Now, how does that justify $250K for our two local supts.?
Contract extensions for the two highest paid bureaucrats in our local governments with the two highest budgets and all you get is crickets. But the nut brigade goes nuclear about whether the Chamber should head a holiday lights committee.
This is why the schools keep sliding.
Re the Mother Commenting on Facebook. Yes, she’s Park Ridge cliche cheap, But:
Wouldn’t it be nice if she didn’t have to move and could CHOOSE the school she wants her little freeloader to go to?
There will NEVER be any significant change to public schools or salaries or pensions, until the money is truly in the hands of the tuition holder.
Imagine if you had a school of 1,000 and salaries went up, pensions were in debt and the parents then had to write a direct and meaningful check for it. Do you think there would be more uproar? Let’s bet these large raises wouldn’t happen. That freeloading sucker of our tax dollars is bent over pizza money!!!
My idea is, every single household gets a $500 (or around) tax credit exemption who does not use our public schools. Then, the houses that use them, will have a more direct way of understanding the costs, without an actual “voucher” which makes union people cry. When you condense the costs to the users, it would create much more accountability.
However, when you have Unions, PTO’s, and freeloaders all in bed together, it’s an unstoppable force. Anyone opposing spending more on “education” is anti-child and heartless.
Why do we not trust free markets when it comes to things like education?
EDITOR’S NOTE: Sorry, but your utopian dream ain’t happenin’ in our uber-corrupt Illinois controlled by the teacher-beholden Democrats. So you’ve just wasted your own and everybody else’s time, and some electrons, on something that has no practical value.
Good point made by Anonymous 08.07.15 6:05 am.
I am surprised more parents of parochial school children do not challenge the tax and spend ways of the school districts, considering that those parents truly are paying double. But come to think of it, I know a few of those people who have moved out of Park Ridge after their last kid left for college. The difference there, however, is that they were 100% net payers, so we all benefited from their residence, unlike the mom who is burning through the taxpayers’ money and will then leave as 90% plus net users.
EDITOR’S NOTE: That’s a point we’ve been making for a long time, especially in response to the freeloaders whining about a couple/few hundred dollars of student fees when they’re already getting $10K or more of “free” education per kid.
Re that mom who is going to leech and leave, another version of that mindset is on display on the Park Ridge Concerned Homeowners Group FB page where Chris Mahaffey disses complaints about O’Hare noise by saying “I’ve lived here all my life. My Dad, my ex’s, and my job are here because of ORD. I have zero sympathy for anyone who moved here after 1962.”
There you have it. If it’s good for me, screw everybody else.
These raises are very difficult to justify. In the interest of “fairness”, are we going to see a post in the 13K increase for Testin?? He has gone from 95,500 to 125,000 since 2012. I read only vague justification for the raise in the paper.
EDITOR’S NOTE: There is no kind of “fairness” that can be invoked to equate (1) the giving of $30K in raises over 3 years to bring an “at will” employee to $125K, with (2) the giving of a 1-year $250K extension and another $20K in raises in just the first year on the job to a contract employee who already had 2 more years of guaranteed employment at $250K/year (at D-64); or (3) the giving of a 1-year $250K extension to a contract employee who still had 4 years left on his contract (at D-207).
So are you brain-dead, or just a shill for those profligate D-64 and/or D-207 Boards.
These raises are a cost. But why is there never a discussion of
FREE BUS SERVICE in district 64. This doesn’t include children in special Ed …but just for lazy parents.
Seems like low
Hanging fruit to cut.
EDITOR’S NOTE There’s all sorts of “low hanging fruit” – but we haven’t had a D-64 Board majority interested in picking it. And except for Mark Eggemann and maybe Tom Sotos, we don’t have one now.
According to the D-64 website, free bus transportation is available for grades K-8 students “if they live 1.5 miles or more from school or who live in an area that is declared to be hazardous.” We aren’t sure what areas, if any, have been declared “hazardous.” If you don’t qualify for free service, however, you can pay for it at $510.00/child/year or $305.00/child for only the “cold weather” season.
As best as we can tell, bus service is projected to cost taxpayers $502,302 this coming school year.
What do you propose, chief?
I propose:
1. They tell us where th hazardous areas are so we don’t go there.
2. Eliminate all free busing except for special Ed.
I don’t think it’s tough to drive your kid to school or pay the $510.
I also propose the Board goes through the budget and identifies items like this to let the USERS pay the cost and shrink the overall taxpayer portion owed.
Why in Park Ridge do we need free busing? Is it to out of the way to Starbucks or yoga to drive their kids?
Then take that line item and refund it to the tax payers.
EDITOR’S NOTE: We have no bleeping idea what D-64 ever STARTED “free busing” but we concur with your suggestions. Now get yourself to a D-64 Board meeting, tell them your idea, and report back to us with their reaction.
11:47:
I am just curious. If you are so offended by busing why the exemption for special ed??
This is how these school posts always go. PW writes about supt. compensation and someone immediately tries to turn the discussion to the raise for a City employee making half as much as either supt. And then somebody raises busing costs, which has nothing to do with supt. raises.
It’s as if somebody from D-64 or D-207 is being paid to monitor this site and create these pivots.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Never understimate the diligence of anonymous trolls.
When I was recruited by my current employer from another company I was given a one-year contract to mitigate my risk in leaving my previous employer. But that was all, no extensions or renewals. And 7 years later I am still here, but as an at-will employee who can be fired for any reason or no reason.
I can see the need and wisdom of offering someone a 1 year contract to move from one school district to the next. And if I stretch my real-world experience a bit I guess I can maybe see the desirability of a 3-year initial contract. But that’s it, and there should be no extensions. That just encourages complacency.
What “risk” do any of these superintendents incur when they move to another district? Whenever I’ve changed jobs my “risk” was that I’d start the new job and either not like it or them not like me. But a 3-year contract removes that risk, so extending the contract every year so it stays a 3-year contract makes no sense at all. That just goes to show that education (at least in Park Ridge) is a completely risk-free occupation, or a racket.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Exactly! Teachers basically CAN’T be fired; their employer is never moving to another state or Mexico; it’s unlikely to go bankrupt or shut down; and no matter how inept a teacher is he/she cannot be sued for malpractice.
And with a D-64 starting salary with no experience and just a B.A. of $48,582 (and more for D-207) for 8-9 months of work, and automatic minimum $2K jumps after that, it’s one of the sweetest gigs going – even before you get to the gold-plated guaranteed pensions.
Fr me at least, I’m not offended by busing, just not sure why you need me to pay for how your child gets to school.
Take all of the buses you’d like, just pay for it. It’s just silly to offer free bus service, when the taxpayers are getting already soaked.
The exemption for special ed?? Many children are in wheel chairs, or have other special situations, where the logistics are required for a bus.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Okay, but why should that still not be a “just pay for it” service, unless the parents can demonstrate financial need?
9:03:
Bottom line is what you want is pay as you go education or more of a private education model, which is certainly a valid discussion but not the current model under which we operate.
You make the point (I assume you are also the 11:47 poster) about parents dropping off kids on the way to yoga or starbucks. Frankly that is a pretty narrow and stupid view of parents in PR. Neither my spouse nor I have ever tried yoga and our first cups of starbucks are often when we get off the train in the city on the way to work. We also lived inside the mileage limit, but I digress.
All I am saying is that if that is your view of PR parents, it should also apply to Special needs parents as well. I mean they must do yoga and drink starbucks too, right?? They deal with the wheel chairs on the weekends without a bus.
By the way, does distain for paying for buses apply to D207?? I mean who pays for all those buses that take athletes to away games and other such trips?? You see buses and vans in the maine south parking lot bought by your tax dollars.
EDITOR’S NOTE: We agree that “distain” [sic] for freeloading should be uniform and consistent. But in that vein, the transportation of students to school events – whether they be games, field trips or academic competitions – is qualitatively different from parents getting their kids to and from school itself.
It may be “different” but the general concept is the same. A certain group gets something on the taxpayers dime (is that not what the argument is??). If My child is not on the team he/she has no need for the bus yet I still “pay” for it. So, using that argument why would that not be “just pay for it??” If the parents can drop off the kid at school they can certainly take the kid to the game on Friday night, right?
EDITOR’S NOTE: You really don’t have a clue.
The “general concept” is NOT “the same” because it’s not about what the parents can, cannot or should do: it’s about the school managing a school-related GROUP activity in a uniform, cohesive manner for the success/benefit of the activity.
If a parent doesn’t get his/her kid to school on time, the kid (and maybe, indirectly, the parent) suffer the truancy violation. But when the starting QB or the math wizard doesn’t get to the competition in time because dad/mom got a late start, or got lost on the way to wherever, the whole GROUP/team suffers.
Hence, GROUP/team buses – which kids usually don’t have to ride coming home from the event if a parent is there to take them home.
If you have a 3rd grader, he/she is not staying home alone (by Illinois law, it’s illegal) until the bus picks him/her up. So therefore, a Mom/Dad/GP are home, so it is just laziness or other priorities. Anyway, just figure it out.
In fact, last year, schools were CLOSED because it was too cold to wait for a bus. Why is that difficult for children to get a ride to school?
Ok, fine, I’m with you then. The special ed buses should be on need base only. I just can see how parking is an issue, and the logistics of getting him/her into the building easily would be a problem.
9:56am- The point is, we have to shift the costs to the users of the system. We can’t bury the non-users. I believe then the users of the system will then worry more about costs of education, instead of having people who do not use the schools subsidize at such a high rate.
Parents all over Park Ridge or on the Facebook rant pages , wear “I’m outta here after my child is done with Maine South” like a badge of honor. Doesn’t that bother you? They literally are going to use YOUR resources until done, then leave. Are those the people that you want influencing our policy?????? Of course they will drive the costs up, because they don’t care about balanced policy.
Isn’t that evidence enough that the community needs to shift more cost to the user?
So 9:56am- Please state your case why busing should be FREE????????????????????????
EDITOR’S NOTE: Exactly.
For example, a parent who puts three kids through D-64 (K-8) at an average cost of $14K/yr/ea over a total span of 15 years (allowing 2-3 years between kid) will burn through $378,000 of D-64 education. Ironically, Zillow estimates the median Park Ridge home value at…wait for it…$378,200, with approx. $12,000 of annual RE taxes of which roughly $4,000 go to D-64. So over 15 years that’s $60K in D-64 taxes paid for $378K of education.
Even if you adjust the taxes to double by year 15, there will still be $250,000-plus shortfall that needs to be made up by the rest of the taxpayers.
Freeloaders, and math, are killers.
Oh my god!!! This is a classic example of how completely arbitrary these discussions can get. You apply these principles as you see fit and with no consistency.
Are you telling me that PR parents are not responsible enough to get their quarterback to the game on time??? I bet if they get him to practice late he sits for awhile or runs laps after practice. We cannot manage getting our participants to the games or events so the taxpayer is on the hook for the bus?!?! Hell, I bet the football coach has a hell of a lot more influence or levers to get the kid to show up on time that the math teacher.
By the way, as I am sure you have guessed from my other posts, I have ZERO problem with busing, period!! Of course the programs have to be monitored (mileage, overall costs etc) but the idea of busing kids to school or games or other events does not offend me in the least.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Yes, that’s exactly what we’re telling you – with the longer the distance the greater the likelihood. We learned that from years of travel sports where there was no team bus and players would sometimes arrive late in warmups or even after the game had started.
What we have guessed from your other comments (e.g., on 08.08 @ 4:55 pm and today at 9:56 and 10:22 a.m.) is that you seem to have “ZERO problem” with anything that involves spending OPM, presumably so long as you get a lot more benefit than you pay for. Typical freeloader who hides his/her identity so that his/her neighbors and friends doesn’t treat him/her as the pariah he/she is.
And by the way, even if your point about managing a group activity makes sense (not saying it does), you could apply the “just pay for it” rule. If your kid plays ball or is on the math team or goes on a field trip you get billed for the buses.
EDITOR’S NOTE: We have no problem with that, but your fellow freeloaders who have melt-downs over $300 annual student fees might disagree.
Not a freeloader here. I just want these wonderful taxpayer saving ideas ya’ll come up with to be applied equally. If we want change the busing model to give back funds to the taxpayer lets apply it equally. If we get rid of it let’s do so across the board. If we charge the parents for it do so for all. Hell if they decide to no longer provide buses to school and bill for event buses I would be OK with that too. If the school board decides to bill families for buses (to school, athletics, events)I will happily pay the bill.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Yeah, right. We’ll believe it when you show up at a D-64 or D-207 Board meeting and make your pitch there.
And we won’t be holding our breath waiting for that to happen, because most freeloaders aren’t boat-rockers.
Got news for ya PD. Most of what you would call “non-feeloaders” aren’t boat-rockers either. How much “boat rocking has there been at board meetings about busing???? or about the raises and subject of your original post????
All the posters who echo your thoughts on this blog are just as anon as I am and I am guessing I have probably been to more board meetings than many of them.
EDITOR’S NOTE: There’s been none. And we would submit that’s the case because both school boards have been so incompetent, so unresponsive and so non-transparent for so long that the average taxpayer has given up on them – unlike with the City Council and, to a lesser extent, the Park Board.
As far as we’re concerned, you and every other anonymous commentator – no matter what their views – are none of the things you claim to be, and have done none of the things you claim to have done.
“As far as we’re concerned, you and every other anonymous commentator – no matter what their views – are none of the things you claim to be, and have done none of the things you claim to have done”.
Really?!?! Well apparently this entire thread has been a lot of sound and fury about nothing. All the posts are by people who are not what they claim to be and have done nothing the claim to have done, unless there really is a Clark Kent in PR. I am betting not.
Funny how you never play the anonymous card so long as the poster agrees with you.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Unlike you, “Clark Kent” didn’t claim to “have probably been to more board meetings than many of [the commentators who agree with these posts]” in order to legitimize his comments.
I thought you went to law school, Pubdog? If you had, you would know that the Illinois Constitution guarantees free public education for grades 1 through 12 to all of its residents.
http://www.ilga.gov/commission/lrb/con10.htm
SECTION 1. GOAL – FREE SCHOOLS
A fundamental goal of the People of the State is the
educational development of all persons to the limits of their
capacities.
The State shall provide for an efficient system of high
quality public educational institutions and services.
Education in public schools through the secondary level shall
be free. There may be such other free education as the
General Assembly provides by law.
The State has the primary responsibility for financing
the system of public education.
(Source: Illinois Constitution.)
EDITOR’S NOTE: Okay, constitutional scholar, hows “[t]he State has the primary responsibility for financing the system of public education” workin’ for you?
Why don’t you give Madigan – or his pocket-puppets Sen. Kotowski and Rep. Moylan – a call and ask them where’s all the “state” money to cover that “primary responsibility.”
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