Hey, all you parents of children who attend Carpenter and Field elementary schools!  How do you like your kids being treated like second-class citizens?

Haven’t you wondered why Carpenter and Field are the only D-64 schools that aren’t air conditioned?  Or why there is no plan or contingency fund to deal with the possibility that Carpenter’s 56-year old boilers and/or Field’s 48-year old boilers might suddenly conk out in the dead of winter?

Let’s start with A/C, to which D-64 obviously made a commitment in most of its schools awhile back. Presumably A/C improves the learning environment by eliminating such distractions as outside noise from open windows.  And sweat dripping off foreheads onto book pages.  And the need for constant hydration.

So why do Carpenter and Field get “Excessive Heat ‘Interrupted Day’ Options at Carpenter & Field Schools” instead of A/C?  Could the District be trying to level the playing field?

After all, Carpenter recently made a first-time appearance on the Chicago Tribune’s Top 50 list of elementary school ISAT scores, tied for 49th place (although, mysteriously, it didn’t show up on the Sun-Times’ Top 100 list).  And Field kids might be suspected of enjoying some extra economic advantage by virtue of their more tony “Country  Club” neighborhood.  Are D-64 officials trying to act as “Handicapper Generals” and impose harsher learning environments on the Carpenter and Field children, mimicking the dystopian America of 2081 in Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron?

Or is this merely another example of incompetent D-64 financial management?

We first raised that question back in our December 7, 2010 post, “A Property Tax Increase To Air Condition And Heat Carpenter School?”  Since then, according to Elementary School District 64 Supt. Philip Bender in his recent interview by TribLocal’s Jennifer Delgado, the District’s brand new “architect of record,” Fanning Howey (“FH”), has completed a $100,000 evaluation of the District’s facilities as part of a “facility master plan.” 

And guess what?  Air conditioning and new boilers for Carpenter and Field have been identified as  needs…but not until next year’s (2012-13) budget, at the earliest.  And, apparently, that’s only because of the hell being raised by some active, vocal parents – a few of whom don’t even have kids at Carpenter or Field.

According to a story in this week’s Park Ridge Journal (“District 64’s Master Plan”), the District is relying on those whiz-bang FH architects and engineers to “teach the board, and educate the public, on how to go about this process of decision-making regarding all of our schools” – a process that is being planned to take until May 2012. 

Exactly how inept are our D-64 officials when they have to hire architects and engineers to provide lessons on public policy and decision-making? 

Frankly, it’s outrageous that Carpenter and Field have been neglected to the point where they have no A/C, and are limping along with boilers that sound like they could fail at any time.  And it’s obscene that the District appears to have neither the money nor a plan for addressing those situations immediately – while at the same time reportedly having the 4th highest compensated administrators and the 25th highest compensated teachers in the entire State of Illinois. 

We’re willing to cut Supt. Bender and School Board members Anthony Borrelli and Dan Collins a tiny bit of slack, given that they are the new kids on the block.  But what excuses do “senior” Board members John Heyde, Eric Uhlig, Sharon Lawson, Pat Fioretto and Scott Zimmerman have for this goat rodeo – other than to blame the departed Supt. “Mustang Sally” Pryor?   

Meanwhile, the District continues to muddle along with its second-class treatment of students whose parents basically pay the same property taxes as those whose kids don’t risk heat stroke or frostbite to get their educations.

Go figure.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Late last week a “blast” e-mail went out from School District 64 Supt. Philip Bender that included the following bullet-point:

• I am pleased to announce that District 64 is now videotaping Board of Education meetings.   The videotaping is one of the ways the Board is enhancing the transparency of its operations and engaging stakeholders.  It also meets our Strategic Plan goal of accelerating the use of advanced technology.  Beginning with the August 22 meetings, the full-length videos can be viewed by selecting the meeting link on our website: http://www.d64.org/subsite/dist/page/board-education-meetings-984

To listen to that bit of propaganda, one would think that Bender and the School District 64 Board were in the forefront of promoting transparency and accountability of D-64 activities.

But as recently as the July 11th board meeting, Board member Scott Zimmerman – sounding clueless about the Illinois Open Meetings Act – branded the videotaping of meetings as “against school board policy,” while Bender insisted that he would need an opinion from the District’s legal counsel because he was “extremely uncomfortable that someone could manipulate and edit the video.”  With only newbie board member Anthony Borrelli speaking in favor of videotaping, it looked like it would be buried “in committee” for several months, if not longer.

Enter Marshall Warren and several other citizen activists (including Char Foss-Eggemann and Susan Sweeney), who showed up at the Board’s August 8th meeting with video camera in hand and videotaped that meeting on their own, uploading the video to a YouTube site appropriately labeled “sunshine4d64.”

As if by magic, the District had its own video camera up and running at the very next (August 22nd) meeting – and almost immediately its propaganda machine began shamelessly spinning the “transparency” credit away from the citizens and towards the District’s administration, as if videotaping were its idea all along.

The shameless deception can only be appreciated in light of the fact that even the TribLocal story dated August 26, 2011, carried the headline “Prodded by parents, District 64’s school board begins recording meetings,” and noted that, even after videotaping had been requested, “the district didn’t budge.”

For the time being, Warren et al. are planning to keep on videotaping while at the same time lobbying WOW to provide the camera and equipment for broadcasting D-64 meetings live as WOW recently did for Park Ridge City Council meetings.  And they should continue their own videotaping, given that the apathy and even outright antipathy D-64’s cast of characters (save for Borrelli) has displayed toward videotaping raises a possibility of some controversial segment of some future board meeting mysteriously disappearing into a “Rosemary Woods”-style, 17-minute gap.

Which brings us to the most important element of this videotaping saga: credibility.  Specifically, the credibility of D-64’s leadership.

If not for Warren and his merry band of activists, there is no way in H-E-double hockey sticks that D-64 would be videotaping its meetings – just like there was no way the City was going to videotape Council meetings until then-newly elected Park Ridge Mayor Dave Schmidt donated a video camera and recruited George Kirkland and Charles Melidosian, thereby proving that it didn’t cost anywhere near the $120,000 City Staff had budgeted to start videotaping City Council meetings.

What would it have taken for Bender and the D-64 Board to have prefaced their propaganda statement with the words “In response to the requests from members of this community…”?  Only the willingness to start playing it straight with the citizens who have made Bender and his fellow D-64’s administrators the 4th highest paid in the State of Illinois, and D-64’s teachers the 25th highest paid teaching staffs in the state – according to a May 31, 2011, study published in the Chicago Sun-Times – while the academic performance of D-64 students doesn’t begin to approach either of those two lofty rankings.

But apparently that kind of honesty is too much to ask, either from the bureaucrats themselves or from the public officials known as the School Board we have elected to make sure those bureaucrats keep their collective thumb off the scale, so to speak.

Which should make all of us wonder: If D-64’s administration and board can’t be trusted to tell the truth about something as simple and innocuous as videotaping meetings, how credible and forthright can they be expected to be when it comes to the really big issues, like the $70 million-plus 2011-12 budget that is scheduled for approval next month, or the upcoming teachers contract negotiations?

To read or post comments, click on title.

A watershed event occurred at last night’s meeting of the Board of Elementary School District 64: a handful of private citizens videotaped a D-64 Board meeting.

That’s right: resident Marshall Warren manned the camera on loan from the City of Park Ridge (donated by Mayor Dave Schmidt and, until recently, used by George Kirkland to video City Council meetings) to record the public business being done by the D-64 Board.  Amazingly, this occurred less than one month after Supt. Philip Bender, in response to a request by new Board member Anthony Borrelli, expressed deep reservations about such videotaping and even wanted a legal opinion because he was “extremely uncomfortable that someone could manipulate and edit a video.”

Who would do that, Phil?  Islamo-fascist terrorists?  America’s Funniest Home Videos?  Jerry Springer?

At that same July meeting – which we wrote about in our post “Activist Citizens Add New Dynamic To D-64 Board Meeting (07.12.11) – Board member Scott Zimmerman lamely suggested that videotaping was against Board policy, thereby displaying the fear of transparency and accountability which has plagued the D-64 Board for the past 15+ years. 

As we’ve noted many times before, no branch of local government has seemed as obsessed with secrecy as D-64, whether it involves the hiring of a new superintendent, interviewing Board appointee candidates, retaining an architect of record, finding ways to obfuscate the mediocre student performance on standardized testing, or posting Board-packet materials on-line so late that interested citizens barely have time to review them prior to the meetings.  As recently as July 30, 2011, District 64 “reaffirmed” a set of “Operating Principles” that not only are almost laughable coming from the secretive and combative D-64 administration, but that also appear to mis-state the Illinois Open Meeting Act (“IOMA”):

• Information required by statute to be discussed in closed session and so discussed will remain confidential.

Under IOMA, nothing is “required…to be discussed in closed session” or required to “remain confidential.”  But if these “Operating Principles” are referring to some statute other than IOMA, they should say so to avoid further misunderstandings about what IOMA requires and doesn’t. 

Hopefully D-64’s secrecy and misinformation took a big hit last night, thanks to Warren and his merry band that included Charlene Foss and Shelley Weiner in speaking roles, all of whom pushed D-64 into something it clearly didn’t want to do.

We haven’t yet heard when or where Warren’s video will be publicly accessible, but we assume that will be known shortly.  Kirkland and Charles Melidosian found a way to broadcast the videos of the City Council’s meetings until the City redesigned its website and began hosting them itself, followed by cable newbie WOW’s installing its own equipment in the Council chambers and commencing live broadcasting of those meetings just a few weeks ago.

Meanwhile, we applaud Warren, Foss, Weiner and their associates.  With a $67 million budget teed up and ready for adoption – $10 million more than the City budgets for running the whole darn town – D-64 can certainly use as much scrutiny as the citizenry can muster.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Those of you who chose to attend last night’s Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District Board meeting instead of the Park Ridge City Council Committee of the Whole (“COW”) meeting witnessed something that has been extremely rare until now, but hopefully will become much less rare in the future:  a small group of citizens actually challenged the secrecy and unaccountability of Supt. Philip Bender and a majority of the D-64 Board.

Recent D-64 Board candidate Marshall Warren, Charlene Foss, and a handful of supporters didn’t cause those D-64 officials to cower in a corner, or promise to change their secretive and unaccountable ways.  To the contrary, Bender and certain Board members, clearly unaccustomed to being vigorously questioned by people who actually seemed to know both their legal rights and the relevant school issues, were confrontational from start to finish.

But with every question from Warren and Foss – whether about substantive issues like why the Board recently gave certain employees 2.5% across-the-board salary increases and why the percentage and amount of those raises wasn’t even discussed or announced publicly before being voted on, or about procedural issues like why the Board didn’t post its 105-page board meeting packet of materials on the District’s website until the morning of the meeting – it became increasingly clearer that a new dynamic had been introduced into a public body whose members, like typical old-line Chicago pols, have not wanted to hear from “somebody nobody sent.”

Without the Board’s “alpha” member (president John Heyde) controlling the meeting, it fell primarily to Bender and Board member Scott Zimmerman to quasi-answer/avoid the questions posed by Warren, Foss, et al.  Not surprisingly, several questions brought variations of the historically successful, typically bureaucratic “you just don’t understand.”

For example, when Foss challenged the closed-session discussion of the recent salary increases for the non-union personnel, Board member Sharon Lawson – reportedly with a straight face – insisted that closed session was required because the Board was deciding on individual raises based on individual performance evaluations.  When Foss observed that it just didn’t “make sense” that each of those “individual” evaluations could result in everyone getting the same 2.5% raise, and followed that observation with questions about pension funding, Bender cut off the discussion with an invitation for Foss to meet with him and D-64 business manager Rebecca Allard so that they could “explain” things to her.

We suspect Foss is too savvy to get suckered into that kind of private meeting, where everything is “off the record” and conversations can too easily be spun, disputed and outright denied.  And, given the nature and incisiveness of her questioning, we doubt Bender would enjoy being grilled by Foss about how he can justify what we understand to be his own 2.5% pay raise when D-64’s administrative personnel already are the 4th highest paid in the State of Illinois, yet the District can’t figure out how to pay to air condition Carpenter School so that the kids don’t get sent home for “heat days.”

More importantly, however, explanations by public bodies of what they are doing, and why, belong in public forums rather than in one-off variations on those “closed sessions” so dear to the hearts of Bender, the Board and bureaucrats everywhere.

Warren served up his own dose of agita by advocating for the transparency that would come from the Board approving his videotaping of the Board’s next meeting.  Warren noted how resident George Kirkland had resolutely volunteered his services for videotaping City Council meetings over the past two years at virtually no cost to the City. 

The reaction from Bender and most of the Board could best be described by envisioning a fight scene from the 1960s Adam West “Batman” television series:

“Pow!”

Despite new Board member Tony Borrelli’s reasserting his previously-expressed support for videotaping, Zimmerman opined that videotaping was “against school board policy.”  If true, then “school board policy” violates the Illinois Open Meetings Act (“IOMA”), which expressly permits the private videotaping of public meetings (735 ILCS 120/2.05) subject only to that videotaping not unreasonably interfering with “the overall decorum and proceeding of the meeting.” (735 ILCS 120/2.05 and 1975 Ill. Att’y Gen. Opinion 17).  

Showing an ignorance (or abhorrence?) of IOMA equal to Zimmerman’s, Bender wanted a legal opinion about videotaping from D-64’s counsel because he was “extremely uncomfortable that someone could manipulate and edit a video.” 

Sorry, Phil, but neither IOMA nor the Illinois Atty. General’s office shares your concerns.  And Borrelli already told you about how YouTube video files are difficult to alter.  Consequently, we highly doubt that somebody would bring in the wizards from Industrial Light & Magic to morph your videotaped image into Darth Vader’s – even if you do seem to embrace the Dark Side when it comes to transparent, accountable and fiscally-responsible school district governance. 

Frankly, we’re hoping that Warren will show up at the next meeting with videotape rolling so that we can see – literally see, via that videotape – whether Bender and the Board are willing to invite an IOMA lawsuit against the District by barring him and his camera.

Last night Warren and Foss stepped up to the plate, big-time, in challenging the secretive and fiscally-irresponsible way D-64 has been doing business for the past two decades.  They didn’t back down, and they truly earned the applause they received from the small audience of parents and taxpayers. 

And they deserve applause and support in their endeavors from those of us who believe in honest, transparent, accountable and fiscally-responsible government.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Last week we published another post about the Culture of Secrecy of the Board of Education over at Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 (“Secret Pay Raises At School District 64?” 06.30.11).  Since then, one of our readers – perturbed by the clandestine and fiscally-questionable way the D-64 Board and Administration conduct themselves – has brought some additional facts to our attention that deserve public airing.

The current teachers union contract with D-64, signed by Board president John Heyde and secretary Eric Uhlig on September 8, 2009, contains a couple of interesting benefits for the teachers that we don’t recall anybody on the Board (or anybody in the press, for that matter) publicizing during the negotiation and adoption of that contract. 

The first one, at Article VII, Section O, Paragraph 2(b), provides for the ratcheting-up of a teacher’s compensation by 6% annually during the last two years before retirement:

b.   Provide a salary increase for up to two (2) years prior to retirement in the next to last year of employment and the last year of employment …that is six percent (6%) above the teacher’s creditable earnings in the prior school year.  

That’s right, sports fans, our D-64 Board “negotiated” a guaranteed 12% home-stretch pay increase for imminent retiree teachers – the better to goose up those already-generous underfunded but guaranteed public pensions they’ll be drawing for 20+ and even 30+ years, thanks to retirement ages as early as 55 with the requisite service.  And with cost-of-living increases, of course!

And if that isn’t a nifty enough bon voyage bauble, get a load of what the contract provides at Paragraph 2(c) of that same Article and Section:

c.   Provide a service recognition payment as a post-retirement lump sum payment in the amount of $1,000 per year of service, not to exceed 25 years (i.e., $25,000) for any teacher who retires from the District [during the term of this Contract].

If we read that language correctly, teachers retiring from D-64 get a goodie bag of up to $25,000 when they walk out the door – $1,000 for each year of service.  Beats the heck out of a gold watch…even a Rolex…doesn’t it?

Crazier yet, we can find nothing in the contract that limits D-64’s obligation (meaning the obligation of us taxpayers) for these windfall payments only to those “service” years spent actually teaching in D-64 schools – a limitation that could have been locked down definitively by the simple inclusion of the words “to the District” after “per year of service” if our elected representatives on the Board (including the Harvard-educated, University of Chicago-trained attorney who serves as Board president) wanted to do so.

That the D-64 Board could unanimously (Heyde, Uhlig and their fellow then-Board members Sharon Lawson, Genie Taddeo, Pat Fioretto, Ted Smart and Russ Gentile) adopt such a contract is troubling, to say the least.  That it seems to have been done with little-to-no public debate and no invitation of citizen input by those Board members is appalling.

We also don’t recall any public debate over the compensation and stipend schedules contained in that contract: we heard about “2.5% increases” only after the deal was cut and the respective parties were crowing about how “fair” the deal was – something we criticized in our post “Concealing The Details Of A ‘Fair’ Contract Raises Questions” (09.14.09).  At the time, we thought that 2.5% per year looked pretty darn good…for the teachers.  In retrospect, it looks wonderful…for the teachers.  

And that’s why we can’t help but wonder, albeit perversely, just how many Park Ridge parents would be positively delighted if their own recent college graduates were making “minimum compensation” of $42,720 and health insurance for just a “Bachelor’s Degree and no experience”…with scheduled annual non-performance based raises…for approximately 8 months of actual work, with summers off…in a job that can’t be outsourced to Guadalajara or Bangalore…and from which one effectively can’t be fired once tenure is obtained after a few years on the job?

Again we are reminded of Mark Twain’s famous quote: “God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the school board.”

To read or post comments, click on title.

In our post “City Council Still Not Walking The Fiscal Talk” (06.21.11), we criticized the new City Council’s rubber-stamping of the old City Council’s “blanket, everybody-gets-one, 3% raise that added $185,766 to the 2011-12 budget.”

Needless to say, we aren’t fans of un-merited, across-the-board raises for any employees, but we’re willing to let the marketplace deal with that problem for private companies.  When it comes to public employees who already enjoy minimal/non-existent performance goals and accountability, however, we’re dead set against any pay increases not tied to performance and merit.    

But at least the City Council – both the old one and the new one – had the integrity to publicly discuss both the percentage and the total dollar amount of those across-the-board raises for City employees before voting to approve them, and again before voting to over-ride Mayor Dave Schmidt’s vetoes.  And anybody not in the audience at any of those meetings could still watch the video of those proceedings and judge the debate for  themselves.

That’s not remotely close to the case with the Board and Administration of Park Ridge–Niles School District 64, dominated by Board president John Heyde and Supt. Philip Bender.  Heyde, in particular, acts as if he places the taxpayers’ right to know somewhere between the right to lifetime oil changes at Jiffy Lube and the right to an autographed photo of Hamid Karzai, suitable for framing.

We understand that at Monday night’s meeting, the D-64 Board approved across-the-board raises for school administrators and certain other personnel.  But the amount of those raises, either in percentages or in total dollars, remains a secret because – lo, but not behold – the Board’s meeting agenda is silent on that information, leaving us to guess what is meant by the uber-vague reference to “Approval of Salary and Benefit Changes…” under the Consent Agenda portion of the meeting (8:25-8:30 p.m.).

Although that matter was moved off the Consent Agenda and voted upon as an individual item, it was done with no public disclosure of what those “Salary…Changes” were.  And, not surprisingly, the voluminous meeting materials posted on D-64’s website are completely silent on such “Salary…Changes.”

So what gives, Messrs. Heyde and Bender?  Are you perpetrating yet another lie by omission of information that should have been publicly disclosed before the Board voted on it?  If not, then why weren’t those “Salary and Benefit Changes” a matter of public record well in advance of the meeting, so that interested citizens might have known to show up and speak their piece about them? 

Sadly, if not infuriatingly, this is just the latest in a long line of similar conduct by Mr. Heyde and Mr. Bender (and before him, former-Supt. Sally Pryor) which we have written about in posts such as “D-64 Board Stealthily Picks Architect Of Record” (05.13.11), “More Of The ‘Culture of Secrecy’ At District 64” (09.16.10), “Arrogant And Disrespectful, Or Simply Petty And Juvenile” (04.07.10), “Concealing The Details Of A ‘Fair’ Contract Raises Questions” (09.14.09) and “School District 64: Hiding In Plain Sight” (06.08.09).

The lack of transparency and accountability at D-64 has been a constant since at least when the new Emerson came on-line in 1998, the under-budgeting of which appears to have created the motive for the Board and District administrators to drive the District to the brink of financial crisis while insisting no tax increases were needed – just a $5 million back-door, non-referendum working cash bond issue in 2005, and then a multi-million tax increase referendum in 2007 to keep the Illinois State Board of Education from taking over the District’s financial management.

We can’t quite tell whether the D-64 Board and Administration are simply dismissive, or outright contemptuous, of their “stakeholders” (as all these public-sector propagandists like to label us stiffs who foot the bills).  People who have had so much success in getting their critics to cower at the mere utterance of “It’s for the kids” have learned they can be shameless when dictating to the spineless.

With Heyde playing Cardinal Woolsey to Bender’s Thomas Cranmer, the D-64 Star Chamber is alive, well, and spending our money anyway they please – the taxpaying citizenry remaining none the wiser.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Yesterday the jury handed down its verdict in the long-running, sordid saga of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich: guilty on 17 of 20 counts, almost all of which involve some form of selling out the public interest for somebody’s private, personal benefit.

Selling out the public interest has been Play No. 1 in the unofficial playbook of Illinois government and politics as practiced for at least the past 30 years, primarily by the Democrats who have controlled one or both chambers of the General Assembly for all but 2 of those years – but with the willing and shameless assistance of Republican governors like “Big Jim” Thompson, “Big George” Ryan and, to a lesser degree, “Slim Jim” Edgar.

While “trickle down” economics may be a suspect theory, “trickle down” government corruption is hard reality in our state.  Watching two of our last three governors get convicted of multiple public corruption charges in which they were aided and abetted by some of their closest advisors – also public officials who owed the people of this state honest services – sends the message, at least subliminally, that government corruption is unremarkable standard operating procedure.

But corruption can, and does, take many shapes and forms, some of which seem almost benign to a populace numbed by a steady stream of “Safe Road”s, “Silver Shovel”s, “Gambat”s, “Hired Truck”s, “Crooked Code”s, and too many other assorted scams and frauds to deserve their own catchy nicknames.

Sometimes it’s public “funding” that magically appears after somebody puts the arm on a pliant or outright sleazy politician. Other times it might be a zoning variance that gets pushed through without rhyme or reason. Maybe it’s a summer job that leap-frogs earlier applicants with equal or better credentials to land in the lap of the fortunate son of a public official’s buddy.  Or maybe it’s some other similar “favor” to one special interest or another that inexplicably trumps more important public interests.

As a state with more units of government than any of the other 49, Illinois is effectively a petri dish of government-bred pathogens infecting us at every level. Which means that we can’t realistically rely on the U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI to protect us from even a fraction of them, including in our own community.

What can we do with our local governments here in Park Ridge?

We can start by paying attention and questioning everything our public officials do.  Asking questions, and demanding substantive and meaningful answers rather than hot air, is a great screening device for detecting wrongheaded or kinky dealings. Public officials owe each of us an explanation of what they are doing when they act on our behalf with our money, and why they are doing it: if they can’t explain it understandably, or if it doesn’t make sense, or if it sounds too good to be true, chances are we’re getting fleeced.

And that questioning shouldn’t just be at the City level. The two least-scrutinized and least-transparent branches of local government are School Districts 64 and 207, which do not televise or videotape their meetings and which have become quite comfortable cultivating the sense that the business of education can be understood only by “the educators.” To make matters worse, those two branches of local government account for about 2/3 of our property tax bills.

The bottom line is that every time a public official “put’s his thumb on the scale” – for either his own benefit or for that of some special interest – the rest of us are being cheated out of good government. Even if that doesn’t technically qualify as “corruption,” it most definitely is not “good government.”

And it’s “effing” wrong.

UPDATE (07.01.11):  Sometimes you need to laugh to keep from crying: our new Illinois license plate and Jon Stewart “Blago” bit.

To read or post comments, click on title.

It’s a shame Marshall Warren was unsuccessful in seeking a seat on the Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District 64 board in April’s election, because he proposed more meaningful ideas and changes to the way District 64 does business than any of the successful candidates, save for Anthony Borrelli.  

In a letter published in both local newspapers following the election, Warren challenged D-64 to make a number of those changes, including:

• recording and posting the videos of D-64 board meetings on its website, via YouTube;
• holding its meetings on evenings other than when the City Council meets;
• allowing the public to speak on agenda items when those items are being discussed rather than solely at the beginning of meetings;
• holding meetings in school auditoriums and gymnasiums rather than in D-64’s cramped basement meeting room;
• posting monthly profit and loss (“P&L”) statements on its website;
• posting standardized test score performance, along with any changes from the prior reporting period; and
• posting the salaries of all D-64 employees for the current year and the prior year, showing the inter-year changes. 

You may have noticed that all those points are designed to increase the amount of information going to those Park Ridge residents whose tax dollars have helped D-64 record two dubious achievements: having the 4th highest-paid principals and the 25th highest-paid teachers in the entire state, according to rankings posted in last Tuesday’s (May 31) Chicago Sun-Times.

That’s right, folks: our average teacher and principal salaries – at $72,630 and $155,291, respectively – rank ahead of those paid in much more affluent and better-performing districts like Winnetka ($70,320 & $139,189), Kenilworth ($71,647 & $130,243), Glencoe ($66,973 & $123,500), Wilmette ($67,631 & $137,567), Bannockburn ($71,672 & $146,247), Lake Forest ($63,950 & $131,851) and Deerfield ($70,346 & $129,882); and also ahead of the equally affluent but better-performing districts like Arlington Hts. ($70,958 & $124,413), Northbrook/Glenview ($72,395 & $130,897), Western Springs ($64,614 & $120,010) and Lake Bluff ($66,340 & $149,512). 

Since those rankings were published, we have discovered that even residents who already thought D-64 teachers and principals were “overpaid” when judged by objective student performance measures like standardized test results, nevertheless were surprised to find out that our teachers and principals were that highly-paid. 

But, then again, that’s the kind of information we have come to expect D-64 to affirmatively hide from the taxpayers, considering that it remains the most secretive and least accountable of any of our local governmental bodies.  

Look again at Warren’s seven suggestions, above.  The fact that they were campaign issues in April rather than long-standing, institutionalized D-64 policies and practices shows just how insulated and opaque the current and former D-64 school boards have been for at least the past decade.  D-64’s Culture of Secrecy makes both the Park District’s and the City of Park Ridge’s baby steps toward transparency and accountability look like giant leaps by comparison. 

Go to D-64’s website.  Instead of easy-to-find useful information about things like how the District’s ISAT scores and personnel salaries compare with other districts, you’ll find it filled with what fictional “Col. Sherman Potter” of the M*A*S*H* television series probably would call “mule fritters” or “buffalo bagels.” 

One of our favorite bits of disinformation is an April 25, 2011 “report” on D-64’s “Strategic Plan 2011-12 Implementation” that is loaded with edu-speak jargon – starting with the obligatory “positive changes” and continuing with “authentic service learning,” “civil behavior initiatives,” “all stakeholders in our vital partnership,” “a shared journey,” a “strategy leadership group,” “readiness activities,” “release time,” a “ ‘strategic staffing case’ scenario,” “strategy committees,” “change protocol,” “strategy teams,” and things that are “holistically reviewed” – all of which apparently contribute to “a transformative journey.” 

As “Col. Potter” also was fond of saying: “Horse hockey!” 

We suspect that bit of puffery was orchestrated, if not actually written, by Cambridge Strategic Services – D-64’s strategic-planning/public relations consultant we wrote about back in November 2008 (“Hire A Consultant And Round Up The Usual Suspects,” 11.03.08) and again in May 2009 (“It’s Charade Time At School District 64,” 05.15.09) – if only because Cambridge appears to be claiming a copyright to parts of D-64’s “Strategic Plan”, which includes what has been a fictional “parameter” for D-64 so far: 

“Student performance on the Illinois Standards Achievement Tests (ISATs) will always compare favorably with other high-achieving districts.”

Unfortunately for both the D-64 students and the taxpayers who are paying to educate them, that particular “parameter” is nowhere close to being achieved, as we can recall only two years over the past decade in which D-64 placed even one of its schools among the greater Chicagoland area’s Top 50 ISAT (and, before that, IGAP) performers in either the elementary or junior high brackets.

And that’s despite having the 4th highest-paid principals and the 25th highest-paid teachers in the entire State of Illinois.

To read or post comments, click on title.

The anti-transparent Board and Administration of Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 is it at it again.

As we predicted back on March 9th (“‘Transparency’ Is Still MIA At School District 64”), the D-64 Board went ahead and chose Ohio-based (but with a convenient Park Ridge office) Fanning Howey (“FH”) over Oakbrook-based FGM to become the District’s “architect of record” for the construction project(s) D-64 is contemplating.

Why FH?

We’re not sure, because the only information emanating from the secretive D-64 Board is that a point-based ranking system was used, and that FH got the most points.  Of course, this being D-64, we could find no evidence on the District’s website or elsewhere of either the Board’s ranking system or exactly how FH stacked up to its competition – other than the description (in Appendix 4 to the April 25, 2011, meeting agenda) of the process as being “simple.”  As usual, the D-64 Board members just expect the taxpayers to blindly trust them.

We prefer Ronald Reagan’s “Trust, but verify,” especially when dealing with the Culture of Secrecy at D-64.

But verification doesn’t come easy when dealing with folks who don’t bother to televise or even videotape their meetings, unlike both the Park Ridge Recreation & Park District and the City.  As a result, residents have to rely on sketchy newspaper accounts or on the even sketchier meeting minutes.  Or on D-64’s “Board Meeting Highlights”… so long as you don’t need highlights for any meetings since September 28, 2009. 

With that kind of track record, we’re not surprised that we can’t determine from D-64’s website or elsewhere how many and what kind of points FH scored to best its competition for the “architect of record” spot.  But we are troubled by the knowledge that FH specializes in helping school districts pass referendums.  As we pointed out in our March 9 post, FH’s website touts its “community engagement” and “referendum/bond issue assistance” among its professional architectural credentials.  FH also promotes its ability to help schools recruit various community groups and special interests to support the referendums that will put bundles of school construction dollars into FH’s coffers.

Along those very lines, an October 20, 2010, story in the Daily Herald (“Companies in line for Gurnee school work support referendum”) described how FH caught some flak last year for contributing $1,000 to a group promoting a “yes” vote on a referendum for Gurnee School Dist. 56 to borrow $28.5 million, primarily to build a new school for which FH was going to do the architecture, engineering and design firm.  That contribution was criticized by a Gurnee anti-referendum group and the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, the former comparing it to what occurs in “Springfield and Chicago…giving money to get a job,” while the latter branded it a conflict of interest.

Whether FH practices pay-to-play government contracting or not is beside the point of this post.  What concerns us more is D-64’s continuing and almost flagrant lack of transparency.

Although the minutes of the D-64 Board’s April 25 meeting report that FH was the winner of the ranking process, those minutes are silent on any details about D-64’s ranking system or the various contestants’ scores.  Instead, those minutes happily note that newly-elected Board member Scott Zimmerman “remarked that…the District’s process [was] rigorous, fair and effective” – but without any explanation of why he thought that to be so, or to what “similar processes” he was comparing this one.

Not to be outdone, D-64’s business manager, Rebecca Allard, made a point of including in the published board packet a letter of recommendation for FH from…wait for it…Gurnee School Dist. 56, where Ms. Allard just happened to work a few jobs ago.  That letter raves about FH, with Gurnee’s superintendent gushing that he “could not have been more pleased” to be working with FH – and then re-gushing “in the clearest manner possible that we could not be more pleased” with FH’s services.

Nowhere in all that gushing, however, does the Gurnee superintendent say exactly why they take so much pleasure from FH and its services.  But it looks like D-64 taxpayers will soon be finding out.

In the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate’s May 12 story (“District 64 board OKs $1.6 million for parking expansion, new playground”), D-64 Board president John Heyde is quoted as responding to the $170,808 cost of a new playground at Franklin Elementary School with: “School construction is expensive.”

It sure is, Mr. Heyde.  And it looks and sounds like D-64 taxpayers are going to be finding that out with increasing frequency in the months to come.

To read or post comments, click on title.

To you Park Ridge voters who cast ballots in yesterday’s election: Well done!

You saw through the absurdity of union-backed Park Board members negotiating collective bargaining agreements with the union that backed them.  And you also appear to have seen through the bluster by members of the Park Ridge Senior Center, who reportedly had targeted incumbent Board members Jim O’Brien and Mary Wynn Ryan for defeat because of their refusal to add a ridiculous new sweetheart Senior Center contract to the ridiculous $180,000/year taxpayer subsidy Senior Center members already receive to keep their private “clubhouse” operating and their annual membership dues at a miniscule $35/member.

We offer our congratulations to both O’Brien and Ryan (who ran away from their “union” opponents by more than a 2-1 majority), along with our hope that they have gained an appreciation for those voters who make the effort to inform themselves about the issues and then go to the polls to vote for good government on a community-wide basis rather than for special deals for the special interests.  We also wish to congratulate newcomer Mel Thillens for his first-place finish in that race: hopefully his performance in office will mirror that lofty ranking.

We congratulate new District 64 Board members Anthony Borrelli and top vote-getter Dan Collins, who claimed two of the three available 4-year seats on that Board.  We find it noteworthy and encouraging that lack of a slate of candidates selected by the General Caucus produced the most competitive District 64 election in memory, with 5 candidates for the three 4-year seats and two candidates for the 2-year seat.  Maybe these two newcomers can help lift the veil of secrecy that has characterized D-64 operations for far too long (Hey, folks, how about entering the 21st Century and joining the City and the Park District in video-recording your meetings and posting them on your website?) – as well as start demanding academic achievement commensurate with the District’s per-pupil cost and its teacher salary levels.

Our congratulations to incumbents John Heyde and Scott Zimmerman come tempered with the suggestion that they stop doing business-as-usual – with all that faux self-esteem that D-64 is so good at generating – and start earning their spurs by actually improving the quality and cost-effectiveness of the education being provided.  And Mr. Heyde…lose the hide-and-seek gamesmanship that characterized your Board’s appointment of the new superintendent, its appointment of Scott Zimmerman as a new Board member, and the presentation of the District’s finances.  That’s just for starters.

On the City level, we congratulate Ald. Joe Sweeney on his first-time election as 1st Ward alderman by a vote of 328-200 over challenger Alana Warren.  As the appointed alderman he often talked the “fiscal conservative” talk but then inexplicably failed to walk the walk.  Here’s hoping he develops a comprehensible philosophy of City government, and then some consistency in its implementation.

And In the always-contentious 7th Ward, congratulations go to Marty Maloney, who handily defeated Franklin Ramirez and Lottie Janus 485-237-52 despite the Herculean efforts of 6th Ward resident Gene Spanos to figuratively tar-and-feather Maloney for having the temerity to say that he can’t justify throwing boxcar numbers of tax dollars at an anti-O’Hare fight for which nobody – not the City of Chicago, not the FAA, not the NIH, not the NTSB, not any of our neighboring communities, and neither our Democrat nor our Republican federal representatives – appears to be allied with us. 

Sweeney and Maloney will join with unopposed incumbent Ald. Rich DiPietro (2nd), unopposed write-in candidate Jim Smith (3rd, “the ward democracy forgot”), and unopposed candidates Sal Raspanti (4th), Dan Knight (5th) and Tom Bernick (6th) to form a Council that should be far more fiscally-responsible, transparent and accountable to the taxpayers than the current crop of Frimark holdovers.  Which is good, because the tasks they face look daunting, to say the least – especially after four years of general mismanagement by the clown-car Council heading for the exits.

Finally, as a sad counterpoint to the “congratulations” we have offered the successful candidates and the voters who helped elect them, we offer a hearty round of “boo”s to the vast majority of Park Ridge voters who couldn’t muster enough civic-mindedness to drag their sorry derrieres to the polls.  In the contemporary idiom: “You suck!”

At the very top of the “You suck!” list are the residents of the 3rd Ward, who couldn’t even produce a legitimate petition-filing candidate to actually appear on the ballot.  If this were truly a “just” system, you 3rd Ward derelicts would go unrepresented for the next four years.  But because justice appears to run second to mercy in our system, you will be represented by write-in candidate Jim Smith.

Running right behind the 3rd Ward on the “You suck!” list is the 2nd Ward, where unopposed Ald. Rich DiPietro got 501 fewer votes (723-222) yesterday than he got running unopposed in 2007.  And the bronze “You suck!” medal goes to the 1st Ward, which turned out 508 less voters for this year’s contested race than it did for Dave Schmidt running uncontested in 2007 (1,036 to 528).  Such dereliction of duty reminds us of the following quote:

“Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves; and the only way they could do this is by not voting.”  Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Even those of you in wards where the aldermanic seat was uncontested still had contested races for the Park Board and District 64 School Board that deserved the exercise of your franchise because, combined, they consume over $70 million of our tax dollars each year.  But because you couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be bothered to vote…

You suck!

To read or post comments, click on title.