Comedian Jon Stewart’s valedictory performance on last Thursday (08.06.15) night’s “The Daily Show” contained a segment that should be “must watch” for anybody who wants to understand American (and Park Ridge) politics and not be an unwitting dupe of all those elected and appointed officials, as well as the career bureaucrats whose stock in trade is, in a word, “bullsh*t.”

If you saw the show, or if you watch the clip of it embedded here, you may recognize what Stewart described as “premeditated institutionalized bullsh*t designed to obscure and distract” when you read this week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate article (“District 64 seeks community input from new council,” August 10) about Park Ridge-Niles School District 64’s latest transparency charade called the “Community Relations Council.”

This new Council is the brainchild of Supt. Laurie Heinz, who said it’s something she wanted to do since she came to D-64 a year ago. And since Heinz is already accepting applications for the 20-30 membership slots, we can only assume she got the idea rubber-stamped by the bobble-headed Board majority.

As Heinz is quoted in the article: “I understand that I’m accountable to the community and I want them [sic] to be well informed.”

Premeditated? Check.

Institutionalized? Check.

Designed to obscure and distract? Check.

Heinz so badly wants the community to be “well informed” that, during her rookie year at the helm of D-64, its Board – with not a peep of objection from her – appears to have led all our local governmental bodies (City Council, Park Board and D-207 Board) in those secretive closed-session meetings designed not just to obscure the taxpayers’ view of what the D-64 Board is doing but to conceal it altogether.

As a result, Heinz has had no problem with keeping the community in the dark by what seems like a closed-session at every meeting – and especially not with all those closed sessions Board president Tony Borrelli called leading up to her recent contract extension and raise. An extension and raise based on those reportedly outstanding mid-year and year-end written reviews that never saw the light of day.

An extension and raise that the community didn’t know any details about until the moment they were called for a vote by the Board.

She also has failed to provide details of the mysterious student fees the District keeps billing parents.  The roughly $300/year/kid ones those freeloader parents don’t want to pay without an itemized list of every pencil, paper clip and Dixie Cup that comprises them – even though they’re getting $14,000/year/kid of “free” education that they will never come close to repaying through their RE taxes, even if they don’t bolt from Park Ridge the minute their youngest graduates Maine South, as a D-64 mom bragged about in a comment on the Park Ridge Citizens Online Facebook page.

And let’s not forget the chirping crickets coming from her office at even the merest mention of D-64’s modest rankings and the stagnant student achievement on the standardized tests that help keep those rankings depressed.

So don’t be fooled when Heinz says she wants a “well informed” community. What she wants is a clueless, docile community that keeps paying her $250K-plus per year until she finds herself another district offering an even better deal, all the while demanding no measurable improvement in D-64’s rankings or its students’ performance.

And that’s going to take a public relations machine of 20-30 gullible rubes, preferably well-known and with large circles of friends and acquaintances, who are willing to serve as naïve endorsers and mindless conduits of whatever propaganda Heinz, the D-64 Board and its minister of disinformation, Bernadette Tramm, crank out.

Think of them like those paid shills at old-time traveling medicine shows who could barely limp up to the wagon with their last dollar to buy a bottle of Doc Watson’s Magic Elixer – which they would guzzle down right then and there before almost immediately proclaiming themselves miraculously cured of the gout, lumbago and the grippe.

Except that those 20-30 Community Relations Council members will be doing their shilling for free.

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