Last week, both local papers reported on the new teacher contract approved by Park Ridge-Niles School District 64, under which the teachers will receive a 2.5% increase per year over the next 3 years.

Both newspaper articles similarly pointed out that the teachers will also get annual “step” increases, although only the Journal noted that those step increases will average approximately 2% – making the raises on average approximately 4.5% per year, or approximately 13.5% guaranteed over the three years of the contract.

What we find troubling about both accounts, however, is that there is no mention of exactly what that 2% – or 4.5% – translates to, either over the range of more than 360 individual teacher salaries or, more importantly, for the overall cost to the District. 

That’s not the best reporting by our two local newspapers, but we suspect that one reason for the absence of such information is that it wasn’t offered up by either the District or the Union.  And local governments around these parts know that not offering such information to overworked and underpaid suburban reporters pretty much ensures that it won’t show up in their stories.

So if you’re either Board president John Heyde or Union president Fred Klonsky, saying nothing about the total extra dollars this contract will cost the taxpayers means that they can get away with patting each other on the back while telling the stiffs who pay the bills that the contract was “fair.”  Who’s in a position to beef when they don’t have any hard numbers to beef about?

Even District 64’s own website posts only a press release [pdf] which, not surprisingly, is silent on these overall costs.  And if you go to the District’s website and look up its “Education Finance Fact Book,” you will find that the District’s teachers were paid $22.3 million…in 2006 [pdf], the last year the District has reported. 

In a world of truly transparent government, the District would keep such information up to date – which shouldn’t be that hard when it’s just a matter of website management.  So we have to wonder whether there’s a reason why subsequent years’ figures aren’t reported, especially because we have to assume the District and the Union had them to use during their 2.5% negotiations.

Could it be that lack of information beyond 2006 is a convenient way for the District to avoid reporting on salaries for 2007 and 2008, the years in which there was an influx of extra money coming from the most recent tax increase referendum?  You remember that referendum, don’t you…the one in which the District, the Union, and their respective supporters virtually swore on a stack of Bibles that those tax increases wouldn’t be going for higher teacher salaries?

Well, no matter how you spin it, a 4.5% (general and step) annual increase means over $1 million in extra salaries, even based on that outdated 2006 salary figure.   Which means that some of that referendum tax money is, indeed, going for higher teacher salaries.

So yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and “he” is all the taxpayers of District 64 who continue to fill the stockings of the District 64 teachers – and those well-paid administrators, whose salary increases have a “Compound Annual Growth Rate” that’s almost 2% higher than the teachers’ raises over that 2002-2006 period – without regard for the educational performance (e.g., standardized testing) of the District’s students. 

But for all you taxpayers who may have lost your private sector jobs, or have watched your private sector pay cut, or seen your private sector 401(k) turn into a 41(k), the District wants you to know that its “teachers will continue to contribute toward the cost of their own health insurance coverage.”

Just like private sector employees have been doing for decades, even without those guaranteed 4%+ salary increases.

Today’s Park Ridge Journal reports on the chief goals of the “Student Learning Department” of Park Ridge-Niles School Dist. 64 for the new school year (“Dist. 64 Lays Out Goals For School Year,” Sept. 2).  Thirteen bullet-point goals are identified.  

Most of them sound like the specialized “educator” version of that gobbledy-gook known as bureaucrat-speak, compliments of assistant superintendent for student learning Diane Betts: “Continue to develop common professional knowledge…,” “Develop an improved system of learning supports and extensions…,” “Seek opportunities to provide information to parents…,” and our favorite: “Improve knowledge of how assessment data can be used to drive instructional decisions.”  

Blah, blah, blah.  Or, if you prefer: Yada, yada, yada. 

Nowhere in that Journal article did we find any mention of something as mundane as “improving student performance on standardized tests” or “improving the academic rankings of Dist. 64 among comparable school districts.”  

For years the Dist. 64 school board and administration has explained away its lackluster standardized test scores in a variety of ways, the most dependable being: “We don’t teach to the tests.”  In other words, we can’t win at that game so we’re not really going to play.  That’s a slick politician’s answer, but it doesn’t work nearly as well when your competition isn’t another slick politician but, instead, better-performing school districts in equally-affluent, and even less-affluent, suburbs.  

As we pointed out in “Time For Taxpayers To Start Paying Attention To School Dist. 64? (10.31.08), not one District 64 school currently ranks among the “Top 50” in academic achievement as measured by the annual ISAT tests, a situation that has existed since ISAT (and before that, IGAP) performance rankings started being published several years ago.  

If our property values really are as tied to the quality of our schools as our school bureaucrats and their apologists insist – especially when they’re pushing for voter support of a big tax increase referendum, like they did in 2007 – then we should be very concerned about the perception, based on rankings determined by standardized test scores, that Dist. 64 doesn’t come close to measuring up to Northbrook/Glenview Dist. 30, Wilmette Dist. 39, Deerfield Dist. 109, Libertyville Dist. 70, Northbrook Dist. 27, etc., whose schools consistently rank among the “Top 50” in one or both of the “elementary” [pdf] and “middle” [pdf] school categories.  

With increased airport noise, increasing flooding, and a City government that seems to be in a financial death-spiral already adversely impacting Park Ridge’s desirability among similarly-affluent communities, we can no longer rely on our prime location alone to compete favorably with our peers.  And we surely cannot afford an elementary/middle school district that sucks in approximately 33% of our increasingly hefty property tax bills and produces less than first-class results. 

Instead of hearing a lot of indecipherable bureaucrat-speak, when are we going to start hearing clear and understandable goals like: “Consistently place at least one Dist. 64 school among the Top 50”?

Today we are going to take it a little easier and simply pose some questions…without suggesting any answers.  Hopefully some of you readers will be able to provide those. 

Question No. 1:  Should the City pass through to residents all costs it incurs to third-parties for services provided to residents (e.g., the increase in water costs imposed by the City of Chicago) at 100% of the City’s cost?

Question No. 2:  Should the City continue to run budget deficits rather than increase taxes?

Question No. 3:  Do local political parties (e.g., the old “Homeowners Party” or the new “Citizens for Non-Partisan Local Elections”) help or hurt the local political process?

Question No. 4:  Does the General Caucus really improve the quality of the members elected to the District 64 school board?

Question No. 5:  Do the two local newspapers – The Journal and the Herald-Advocate – do an acceptable job of reporting local news?

Question No. 6:  Should the cost of all Park Ridge Recreation and Park District services, including Community Center membership, be “free” to residents (i.e., paid totally by property taxes, which would need to be increased for that purpose)?

Question No. 7:  Should the City acquire private property whenever it becomes available and “bank” it, even when it has no immediate, concrete plans for its use (as in the Courtland property immediately south of City Hall)?

Question No. 8:  How much more per year are you willing to pay in property taxes to the City for some form of meaningful, city-wide flood control?

Question No. 9:  Should the City continue its new practice of Committee-Of-the-Whole meetings or return to separate, individual committee meetings?

Question No. 10:  Should all of our local governments videotape and post the videos of their meetings on-line? 

Have at ‘em!

School  Dist. 64 Test Results Unclear.  This week’s Park Ridge Journal reports that Park Ridge-Niles School District 64’s most recent MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) results in math, reading and language arts leave something to be desired, with 40% of the D-64 students failing to meet their “growth goals” in the past 3 years (“Test Scores Reveal Good, Bad News For Schools,” July 15).  One of the suggested explanations/excuses: a “summer slump” with kids not retaining knowledge and skills over the summer, causing notably lower scores in the Fall tests than in the Spring.

We don’t know about a “summer slump,” but can Dist. 64 and the local newspapers stop reporting that our students “scored higher than the national average”?  A community with the affluence and advantages of ours should be embarrassed to consider comparisons against the “national average” in anything academic! 

Are The “Yutes” On The Loose?  Both local newspapers are reporting that 5 residents of the Park Ridge Youth Campus required police attention last week: 4 girls (ages 12, 13, 13 and 16) were charged with disorderly conduct; one (age 14) was charged with battery; and another (age 14) was arrested on an outstanding warrant from Markham.

We understand and applaud the Youth Campus’ mission, and many people in this community have supported that mission for many years.  But these kinds of incidents suggest that the Youth Campus’ staff isn’t taking “security” seriously enough.

City Government a la Allegretti. We’ve never been fans of Ald. Jim Allegretti (4th Ward), an unabashed cheerlead for closed sessions and governmental secrecy, irresponsible spending and giveaways of taxpayer money, and an overall lack of governmental accountability.  So he didn’t disappoint us when, just this past Monday, he led the effort (supported by Alds. Don Bach, Tom Carey and Robert Ryan, naturally) to let the City Council overturn zoning text amendment decisions of the City’s Planning & Zoning Commission (“P&Z”) by simple majority instead of super-majority.

We’ve seen the P&Z process function reasonably well over the years, perhaps even better than the rest of City government.  So why is Allegretti – or Bach, Carey and Ryan – choosing to meddle with something that’s not broken when they so blissfully ignore so much of what is? 

City Government a la Allegretti, Part II. After making it easier to bypass P&Z, Allegretti then tried to but the kibosh on a plan by AT&T to bring its “U-Verse” cable television services to Park Ridge.  Not only would that bring potentially beneficial competition (v. Comcast), but the AT&T proposal included payment to the City of 6% of AT&T’s gross revenues from its Park Ridge services, which could turn into some real money – one of the reasons Allegretti gave for touting a text amendment to liberalize the City’s billboard zoning.  Allegretti’s objection to the U-Verse boxes? They’re “unsightly.”

Hey, Jimbo, now you’re cutting into the Appearance Commission’s territory!

Yesterday’s edition of the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate contained an article announcing the hiring of Rebecca Allard as the new business manager for Park Ridge Niles Elementary School District 64 (“School board approves new business manager,” June 11).  She will replace Bruce Martin, who has served in that capacity for the past several years.

Ms. Allard comes to District 64 from Palatine District 15, where she served only a year after moving over from Geneva Unit District 304 in Kane County.  Prior to that, she served as director of business and personnel for the Gurnee School District.

Call us “old school,” but we would have expected that a new school district business manager’s first public statements would be about things like school finance and fiscal responsibility. As quoted in the H-A story, however, Ms. Allard seems far more into “successful relationships”: “I believe successful relationships are based upon successful relationships and that’s knowing one another and feeling comfortable and having those conversations.”

As we see it, the emphasis on “relationships” over objectively measurable credentials and performance has been one of the prime contributors toward creating the mess of incompetence and corruption that has become the hallmark of government at all levels in Illinois.  That’s because it is “relationships” that are the lifeblood of sweetheart insider deals, of putting the idiot siblings (or cousins, or in-laws) of the well-connected on government payrolls, of giving the somebodies-who-know-somebody the no-bid contracts.  And while those relationships surely are “successful” for the beneficiaries of those deals, they tend to be disastrous for the taxpayers who have to fund them.

Maybe we’d be a little more tolerant of such comments if the recent history of District 64’s finances were not so checkered.  As we have pointed out many times before, the first half of this decade saw the District on the Illinois State Board of Education’s “Early Warning” or “Financial Watch” lists – the two lowest financial rankings the ISBE gives to school districts – four times, the latest during the Spring of 2005. 

By the Fall of 2005, things were so bad that the ISBE appeared poised to take over the District’s finances.  So the District employed a sneaky “back door” working cash bond issue – ostensibly, to cover the Cook County Assessor’s and Cook County Treasurer’s delay in getting the District its second installment of property tax revenues, but in reality a subterfuge for funneling $5 million in what amounted to borrowed funds into its depleted reserves, thereby keeping the ISBE at bay until the District could pass its big tax increase referendum in 2007.

As best as we can remember, the departing Bruce Martin was the District’s business manager during those bleak years; and, as best as we can tell, he was getting paid rather handsomely for his efforts [pdf].  We don’t know what Ms. Allard will be making – the H-A story doesn’t mention it – but she wasn’t doing too shabbily herself [pdf] even before her most recent stint at Palatine District 15.

As the biggest “local” property tax consumer, District 64 owes the taxpayers a commensurately substantial duty to spend those tax dollars wisely – a task that will fall in no small part to Ms. Allard.  We sincerely hope, therefore, that she left behind in Palatine the viewpoint she expressed when responding to questions about retiring superintendant Robert McKanna’s $327,596 of total compensation, noting that such amount “was in line with what other superintendants get on the way out in a district this size.”

That’s the kind of herd-mentality bureaucratic thinking that spawns, not solves, budgetary problems – and that fuels, not quells, public cynicism about our elected officials and our various governmental bodies.

Park Ridge – Niles School District 64 recently swore in four new board members: Pat Fioretto, Russ Gentile, Sharon Lawson and Eric Uhlig, all of whom ran uncontested with the endorsement of the General Caucus.  Those last two facts virtually guarantee that none of them have any inviolate principles or other “sharp edges” that might prevent them from going along to get along. 

Given that sad “pedigree,” we don’t hold out much hope that any of them will help construct a “new majority” of the school board which will be inspired to bring some much-needed transparency and accountability to what historically has been the most opaque, cost-ineffective and self-congratulatory arm of Park Ridge local government.  If you don’t believe us, just take a look at the District’s website, http://www.d64.org/, basically a collection of self-serving factoids and quasi-analysis which predictably makes the District look like a much better-run organization than it has ever been.

For example, check out the “District Finances” section.  The “ISBE Profile” section brags about the fact that the District has received the Illinois State Board of Education’s “Financial Recognition” rating – the highest rating offered by the ISBE – since 2007, when the voters approved the whopping multi-million tax increase referendum just a couple of years after the District snuck through $5 million in non-referendum working cash bonds (“WCB”s) by telling the Big Lie: That those bonds were needed to combat delayed real estate tax revenues.  In fact, those WCBs were used to free up those belated tax revenues so that the latter funds could partially replenish the District’s depleted fund balances.

Not surprisingly, there’s no mention of the fact that those fund balances were depleted during the first half of this decade by the financial bungling of Superintendant Sally Prior and her fellow high-ranking administrators, which was rubber-stamped during that time by Caucus-anointed school board members Steve Lieber, Barbara Jones, Jane Meagher, Joe Baldi, Rich Brendza, Sue Runyon, Dean Krone, Steve Latreille, Christina Heyde, Ares Dalianis, Chris Mollett, Ron James and Marty Joyce – or that the District desperately needed those multi-millions of dollars generated by the WCBs and tax increases to prevent the ISBE from stepping in to manage the District’s finances because of several years of the District’s receiving the ISBE’s unfavorable “Financial Early Warning” and “Financial Watch” ratings. 

That’s not to say that those folks are bad people.  They aren’t.  But with the exception of Krone’s one brief shining moment (when he suggested, unsuccessfully, that any leftover “New Emerson” construction funds be rebated to the taxpayers rather than rolled into the general education fund), they also showed in no uncertain terms that they lacked the understanding, the ability and/or the courage to oversee the District’s management by its administrator in ways that maximized educational quality within the constraints imposed by the tax caps that were instituted way back in 1994.  And they also displayed a clear lack of understanding, ability and/or courage to tell the taxpayers the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the practical results of their stewardship of the District.

That’s why, although presiding over the District’s relatively straight-line decline into financial crisis, they regularly patted each other on the back even as they caved in the face of a brief strike by the teacher’s union, and even before they began giving Prior all the salary increases that have pushed her compensation beyond $215,000 (as best as we can tell).  Meanwhile, the District’s budget has grown even larger than the City’s.

Want to find out the state of District 64 (apparently its version of the State of the Union, or the State of the State)?  Go to, and click on, the “About Us” heading.  Then click on the “State of the District” [pdf] and you’ll find it…as of Fall, 2006!  That’s not the level of candor, or even the level of attention to detail, that inspires a whole lot of confidence.

But when it comes to student performance, we couldn’t find anything on the District’s website that showed us where the District ranks among the other districts in the Greater Chicagoland area in terms of ISAT scores.  We’re guessing that’s because, as best as we can tell from the ranking information that is available from other sources (such as the Chicago Sun-Times), District 64’s performance on those tests is lackluster at best…although you’ll never get the administration or board to acknowledge it: When they can’t avoid the topic, their mantra is always one of the many variations on the theme “we don’t teach to the test.”

Can’t you just hear Prior or the designated District 64 spokesman sneer (in her/his best “The Treasure of Sierra Madre” bandito voice): “Test scores?  We don’t need no stinking test scores”?

The District’s website also furnishes a variety of information about compensation of teachers and administrators, but it does so by nameless categories, tables and fictional examples (“Teacher A” and “Teacher B”) that really don’t tell the taxpayers much at all. The simpler and better alternative would be to publish the compensation of each individual teacher and administrator by name – so that the taxpayers can tell exactly to whom they are paying how much for whatever quality and quantity of service each such employee is providing.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for that level of transparency and accountability.  District 64 hasn’t provided it yet, and we don’t expect to see it anytime soon.  For the people who run the District, and for the Caucus folks who were instrumental in putting them in office, warm and fuzzy propaganda is always preferred over straight-shooting. 

On Monday the traditional Park Ridge Memorial Day Parade will step off from South Park (Cumberland and Talcott) and end after passing the reviewing stand at City Hall.

The Parade is always a festive occasion, with the typical blend of elected officials, political organizations, community groups and various and assorted other participants mixing in for an entertaining event that brings the community together in a Norman Rockwell-esque sort of way.  And there’s nothing wrong with that.

But Memorial Day is really not meant to be a celebration.  It is a national holiday intended to commemorate and honor our fallen heroes, the men and women who have died in service to our country.  Unfortunately, that purpose seems to be increasingly lost among both the parade marchers and the parade watchers.

So we have two suggestions for those of you marching in this year’s Memorial Day Parade:

First, every group marching in the parade should invite one or more veterans, or current servicemen/women, to lead the group.    

Second, every individual marcher, adult and child alike, should buy a poppy from the folks selling them on the street corners and shopping areas all over town, and wear that poppy proudly as you march on Monday.  The same goes for those of you watching the parade.  And when you do, think of the poppies that inspired Canadian Army Lt. Col. John McCrae to write the words to “In Flanders Fields”:

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below. 

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Over the past few weeks we have been beating up on the City of Park Ridge for its $2 million deficit budget.  But of our three main local governmental units, neither the City of Park Ridge nor the Park Ridge Recreation and Park District can hold a candle to Community Consolidated School District 64 when it comes to spending the taxpayers’ money.

Not only does District 64 have the biggest budget of the three but, as can be seen from the “expenditures” pages (11 & 12) of District 64’s 2008-09 budget document [pdf], District 64 has been on a two-year spending kick, apparently to make up for those years when it teetered on the brink of financial catastrophe and regularly flirted with the unfriendly takeover of its finances by the State Board of Education.  Expenditures jumped $6 million (a/k/a, 12.5%) from 2005-06 ($47,985,622) to 2006-07 ($54,134,215), and another $8 million (a/k/a, 14.8%) from 2006-07 to 2007-08 ($62,290,761).

That’s a whopping 27.3% increase in just two years!!!! 

Unfortunately, we can’t tell exactly what real educational benefits the taxpayers, or even the students, have received from that monumental increase, because District 64 tends to be vague and mysterious on such things as objectively measurable performance or standardized (ISAT) test scores.  But one thing we can tell you with certainty: you won’t find one District 64 school on the Chicago Sun-Times’ lists of the Top 50 Illinois elementary schools and the Top 50 Illinois middle schools [pdf].

But we can always feel better about ourselves knowing that District 64 Supt. Sally Pryor makes it into the “Top 50” elementary school district administrators (as reported by the Family Taxpayers Foundation) with her 2008 salary of $228,911.  Is that what they call paying for performance?

Not only can District 64 spend our money like drunken sailors on shore leave, but it is absolutely masterful at public relations – as evidenced by the award just-departed School Board president Sue Runyon won from the Illinois chapter of the National School Public Relations Association (NSPRA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) propaganda machine for the “education” community (translation: teachers and administrators).

And that propaganda machine is hard at work again, as evidenced by the District 64’s May 4, 2009 Press Release [pdf], in which Supt. Pryor hails the District’s new “Strategic Plan” as an “exciting plan” which “captures the hopes and vision we share for the education of our students.”  Warning: If you continue reading the Press Release beyond that point, you had better put on some waders – because the you-know-what gets a lot deeper.

Not surprisingly, there’s no clear mention of this “exciting plan” raising standardized test scores or achieving other objectively-measurable academic standards.  But when somebody talks up a strategic plan by pointing out that it was produced “through more than 35 hours of strenuous effort,” you can pretty much assume that the warm breeze you feel is smoke being blown up your kilt, especially when all that “strenuous effort” occurred “[u]nder the skillful leadership of Dr. Howard Feddema of the Cambridge Group” – the hired-gun consultant we wrote about back on November 3, 2008.

But the real clue that this strategic planning session wasn’t intended to be taxpayer-friendly, or even taxpayer-conscious, comes from the list of folks who participated in that “strenuous effort”: 17 of them were District 64 teachers or administrators, while 11 were “community members” – only one of whom (Bill Kann) had no children in District 64 schools and, therefore, could reasonably be viewed as having no direct personal stake in the process other than as a taxpayer.  Talk about a stacking the deck!

That’s what passes for “community outreach” at District 64, however.  And since “community outreach” is just the propaganda substitute for “round up the usual suspects,” what the taxpayers are really getting with this new “Strategic Plan” and its “Action Teams” is just another charade.

A very expensive charade.

We here at PublicWatchdog have been pretty focused on the goings on in City of Park Ridge government, especially during the last two years of the reign of Mayor Howard “Let’s Make A Deal” Frimark and his Alderpuppets.  And with good reason, we might add.

During these past two years of Frimark’s cut-in-half City Council, the City has booked over $3 million in budget deficits while neglecting such basic infrastructure needs as streets and sewers.  And it just passed a new budget that is showing a $1.8 million deficit, assuming every contingency ends up going in the City’s favor.  Otherwise, we’re in even more trouble.

But today we’re going to take a break from the City’s travails and looking at a local governmental body that gives every indication of being as ineptly managed as the City – School District 64 – even though it’s harder to tell because all seven of its Board members seem to be equally clueless about many of the matters under their authority, especially the financial ones.  That may be why they appear to have ceded most of the District’s financial decision-making (via “recommendations”) to the non-elected members of the Community Finance Committee (the “CFC”).

As reported yesterday in the on-line version of the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Positions approved for new school staff,” April 28), on Monday night the Dist. 64 Board approved the addition of four new staff members and two administrative positions for the 2009-10 school year: a full-time registered nurse, one special-education facilitator (Does he/she “facilitate” the teaching of special-ed students?  What happened to just plain “teaching”?), a literacy teacher for each of the two middle schools, and assistant principals for Field and Washington elementary schools.

According to outgoing Board member Chris Mollet, these new positions “will contribute…to the educational outcome that the children will now have the opportunity to experience.”  Huh?  Mr. Mollet, could you drop the edu-speak and try that again, this time in plain English?

We checked the District’s website of materials related to Monday night’s meeting and found these two action item forms [pdf] for the new-position vote.  Notice anything missing?  That’s right, the cost for each of these positions, or even all of them cumulatively.  And amazingly enough, the cost appears nowhere in the H-A article, either – although the article in today’s Park Ridge Journal pegs the total cost at $385,000 for four of the positions.  So we’re still not sure of the total cost of these new hires.

At least one resident, Tom Johnson, spoke out against increased costs in these tough economic times.  Thank you, Mr. Johnson.  Unfortunately, it didn’t stop the District 64 Board members, who are now flush with the cash from the 2007 referendum and can’t stop spending it – as evidenced by what appears to be an almost $5 million (7.9%) increase in expenses over last year. 

Hey, folks, since when did the cost of living go up that much?  And if we’re paying that much more in expenses, has the quality of the education – as measured by the same standardized test scores that everybody seems to use when rating the quality of schools and school districts – gone up 7.9%?  Or even 3.95%? 

Interestingly enough, the materials for the meeting included a Supt. Sally Pryor memo [pdf] announcing an “Award of Excellence” being issued to outgoing Board president Sue Runyon, who Pryor credits with being “intensively involved” in the last two successful D-64 referendums (the “Yes/Yes” Emerson one in 1997, and the financial bail-out referendum of 2007), as well as for making the District’s finances “more transparent and understandable to local citizens as a steering committee member of the Community Finance Committee (CFC).”   

If that agenda memo for the six new positions with no cost numbers attached is any indication, however, it would seem that “more transparent” still leaves a lot to be desired…and causes us to wonder just how bad “less transparent” might be.

But, then again, that award is coming from the Illinois chapter of something called the National School Public Relations Association (NSPRA) http://www.nspra.org, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization that describes its “mission” as “to advance education through responsible communication” – which it accomplishes “through a variety of diverse services that we provide to Our Members and to other school leaders who contract with or buy from us.”

Hmmmm…that sure sounds a lot like “Have Propaganda, Will Travel.”  For a price.  From our perspective, that’s the last thing a school district (or any other governmental entity, for that matter) needs or should want.  Unless, of course, scamming the taxpaying public and avoiding accountability is the goal – in which case good P.R. is essential.

And guess what.  NSPRA’s website advertises how it provides “experienced advice on a wide range of troublesome topics” like: “Marketing your schools”; “Engaging your community on key issues” and “Passing a bond or budget referendum….” (like the two Dist. 64 referendums, perhaps?); and “Neutralizing pressure groups or dealing with the media during bad times.”  Sound familiar?

As best as we can tell, during Ms. Runyon’s tenure District 64’s finances spiraled downward to the point where the District had made enough appearances on the State Board of Education’s financial “Early Warning” or “Watch” lists that it was in danger of having its finances taken over by the State Board – before they were temporarily salvaged by the back-door issuance of $5 million of “working cash bonds” in 2005, without a public vote.  In 2007, the District finally went to referendum and, with a $25,000-plus campaign war chest from Citizens for Strong Schools, won itself what appears to have been the biggest District 64 tax increase in at least 20 years.

Per Supt. Pryor, Ms. Runyon was “instrumental” in that referendum request.  Too bad she hasn’t been “instrumental” in the biggest increase in educational improvement in at least 20 years…or even 10.

So Ms. Runyon will have to do without a congratulatory wag of the Watchdog’s tail, since it appears that her Award of Excellence has more to do with selling the residents on whatever quality of education the District provides than with actually improving the quality of that education in any notable, measurable way.

Vaya con Dios.

Some bon mots, vignettes and quick hits from the just-completed election season:

·         Did Mayor Frimark really spend a good part of Election Day encouraging people to visit an anti-Schmidt website while in the same breath stating that he doesn’t condone that sort of thing? 

·         Didn’t anybody ever tell Frimark’s political propagandist, Linda “Linda Ski” Szczepanski, that sour grapes (i.e., claiming Schmidt ran “a negative race”) make for bad whine?  

·         Speaking of sour grapes, Wednesday’s Park Ridge Journal quotes a “shocked” Frimark thusly: “[Schmidt] put out four negative pieces portraying me as a crook.”  After looking at all four of those pieces, we think “ethically challenged” would be more accurate than “crook.”

·         Speaking of ethical challenges, how will newly-elected Park Board Commissioner Richard Brandt avoid a conflict of interest in connection with the District’s relationship with the Service Employees International Union that effectively sponsored Brandt’s candidacy?

·         Did Rosemary Mulligan really tell some Maine Twp. Republicans Tuesday night that newly-elected mayors Marty Moylan (Des Plaines) and Dave Schmidt (Park Ridge) are Daley plants who will try to turn their respective communities into “Chicago’s 51st Ward”?

·         Speaking of more sour grapes from Frimark (also as reported by The Journal): “The city of Park Ridge, you’ll have to deal with him.”  Wasn’t Frimark referring to all things Park Ridge using the term “we’ll” just a few days ago?

·         After losing his seat on the Park Board and his sponsor at City Hall (Frimark), whither goest Nick Milissis?  Maybe he should have spent less time trying to kick candidates off the ballot and more time actually campaigning.

·         How soon before newcomer and top Dist. 207 vote-getter Margaret McGrath becomes a real force on that board?  

·         We’re still having a hard time deciding which of Frimark’s answers to the questions posed at The Journal’s debate contained the most inaccurate information.  One thing that seems pretty clear from the videos of that debate, however, is that City Council meetings should be televised (or at least video-recorded).

·         Where will Frimark lap dog Jim Allegretti (4th Ward) curl up after May 4th?

·         Did Sam Spiros Markos’ $17,000 in contributions to Frimark come with a money-back guaranty?

·         We can’t wait to see how much of all that campaign dough Frimark actually spent, and where it went.

·         How will Alderpuppet Frank Wsol (7th Ward) spin the fact that his confusing, misleading, dishonest and unnecessary referendum question still lost by 53.20% to 46.80%?  We’re betting he’ll compare it favorably to the citizens’ referendum losing 83.39% to 16.61%, and then come up with a lame excuse for yet another new cop shop plan.

·         Now that Frimark is out of the way, when will the new “Citizens for Non-Partisan Local Elections” start flexing its political muscle – using the $15,000 “start-up cash” it got from the defunct “Homeowners Party” – to begin fielding its aldermanic candidates for 2011?