In last Monday’s post we compared the D-64 Board’s contempt for the District’s taxpayers to that of political carcinomas, Mike Madigan, Rahm Emanuel and Richie Daley, for their taxpayers.

We also contrasted the Board’s contempt for its taxpayers with its overt favoritism for three special interests: the PREA-represented teachers; the teacher-turned-bureaucrat administrators; and parents of D-64 students who pay $5,000, more or less, of RE taxes to D-64 each year in exchange for $15,000, $30,000, or even $45,000 of D-64 education per year – which is such a bargain that many of them don’t particularly care if the education isn’t what it used to be, or doesn’t compare favorably to many of Park Ridge’s upper-tier “peer” communities.

The Board’s contempt-and-favoritism dichotomy has encouraged a form of “freeloader” mentality, the goal of which is to take far more out of the system in benefits than they pay in RE taxes, even if it means sticking their neighbors with the lion’s share of the resulting shortfall. And if they can run up their benefits high enough that there is virtually no chance of them ever getting back to even by years of paying RE taxes once their kids are out of school, so much the better.

Call it the D-64 variation on the quote attributed to Malcolm Forbes about winning by dying with the most toys. “He who moves out of Park Ridge with the largest debt to local government wins.”

But today we want to focus on a few of the lies told by D-64 representatives as political CYA for the new, secretly-negotiated PREA contract.

And what better way to start than with a few bon mots from Board president Tony “Who’s The Boss” Borrelli (SPOILER ALERT: The “Boss” is actually Supt. Laurie Heinz, which is why you don’t hear Borrelli speaking whenever Heinz is sipping a beverage).

Whenever Borrelli speaks at any length, however, you can bet he’s reading off a script written for him by Heinz and/or the District’s propaganda minister, Bernadette Tramm. If you doubt it, watch the 09.26.16 Board meeting video, starting at the 51:20 mark and continuing to the 1:02:10 mark, and you’ll see and hear Borrelli look and sound like an actor doing his first run-through of a new script at an initial table-reading.

Which is pretty much what it was.

One of our favorite lies is Borrelli’s (actually Heinz’s/Tramm’s) characterizing the new contract as having been “laboriously negotiated” since December 2015. This bit of propaganda must have so excited Heinz and Tramm that they had Borrelli reiterate it by noting, moments later, that the negotiations were “indeed laborious.”

That’s one of the most basic lessons of Sleazy Politics 101: drag a process out as long as you can (preferably until people stop paying attention) and then point to the length of time as proof of how daunting the task was. In this case, Borrelli and Heinz/Tramm must have been confident that their rube constituents and a disinterested local press wouldn’t figure out by looking at the contract – when it finally was published – that what took them 9 months to negotiate could and should have been accomplished in 9 weeks.

Take a look at the blue-lined comparison of the 2012 contract’s “secrecy” provision with the new one. Even the Israelis and the Palestinians could have hammered that out in an hour, tops. And the same could be said for many more of those differences between the 2012 and the new contract.

We also perversely enjoyed Borrelli’s (Heinz’s/Tramm’s) proclamation of how “unique to the District” is the new concept of tying teacher raises to the CPI-U index – which includes the cost of food, gasoline, electricity, apparel, new and used cars, rent, televisions, all school and college tuition, booze, tobacco products, water/sewer services, public transportation, medical care, Internet access, etc.

Not surprisingly, Borrelli (and Heinz/Tramm) didn’t mention how many of the taxpayers paying for the teachers’ raises will themselves be getting raises just because the price of sirloin and arugula, Shell regular, ComEd power, Dockers slacks, a Ford Focus, rent, a Sony 60-inch plasma, Miami of Ohio tuition, Hennessy VSOP cognac, Macanudo cigars, their sewer bill, their METRA ticket, their Illinois Bone & Joint bill,  their Xfinity bill, etc. goes up?

That doesn’t matter to them. But they did make sure that Borrelli went on the record to tell the PREA just how “grateful” the Board is “that this concept was accepted by the PREA.”

Huzzah!

Another of our favorites is Borrelli’s (Heinz’s/Tramm’s) lie about how the taxpayers would not be able to understand the details of the new contract with the “proper background” – while ignoring the fact that it was the Board and the PREA who deprived the taxpayers of any “proper background” by agreeing to hold their negotiations in secret.

But perhaps the most dishonest and unforgiveable lie is Borrelli’s (Heinz’s/Tramm’s) insistence that, if the Board had published the contract for public comment before it was approved, the District would be opening itself up to unfair labor practice (“ULP”) charges, fines and penalties. To quote Borrelli (from the 1:00:15 to 1:00:58 mark of the video):

“The District would most definitely be on the wrong side of any adjudication to [sic] either a ULP or grievance of these issues and would result in fines, fees and penalties incurred.”

Who says so? The District’s lawyers, according to Borrelli.

How do we know? Because Borrelli says so.

Is there any written attorneys’ opinion corroborating Borrelli? Not that we can find.

Why not? We’re betting because this Board didn’t want such an opinion and, therefore, didn’t ask for one.

Why? Because the PREA doesn’t want open negotiations sessions where the taxpayers could hear the PREA’s outrageous demands – not just its financial demands but its insistence on no accountability of the teachers for their own performance and that of their students. And because Borrelli et al. are terrified that real transparency would reveal just how readily and thoroughly they rolled over for the teachers and the administrators.

Which is why they made no attempt to challenge the current contract’s alleged secrecy language and, worse yet, they adopted the same basic secrecy provisions in the new contract – which we predicted back in our 06.21.16 post and again in our 07.26.16 post. So four years from now those negotiations will also be Star Chamber proceedings, compliments of Heinz via Borrelli and his lemmings

We’ll discuss the legality of all this in our next post.

To read and/or post comments, click on title.

Four weeks ago tonight the Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 School Board did exactly what we knew all along it would do: it approved a new four-year contract with the Park Ridge Education Association (“PREA”), a/k/a the teachers union, that will lock the taxpayers into over $200 million of teacher expense over the next four years, without even letting those taxpayers see the document and comment on its terms.

That’s what craven politicians with utter contempt for their constituents do – which is why Mike Madigan has made a career of doing it down in Springfield, Rahm Emanuel does it in Chicago, and Richie Daley did it before him. And that’s one of the biggest reasons why the finances of both Illinois and Chicago are in shambles.

Craven politicians also don’t believe they owe their constituents honesty, transparency and accountability.

That’s why they try, usually with much success, to bamboozle their generally inattentive and downright stupid constituents with waves of propaganda intended to obscure actions designed to benefit those special interests whom the politicians can count on for political contributions, boots on the ground at election time, and the assorted favor or two when nobody’s looking.

So, one big reason why the current D-64 Board members don’t give a flying firetruck about the average taxpayers is basic math.

Three of the current Board members – Vicki “Who? What? Where? Huh?” Lee, Dathan “Just say ‘No!’ to Common Core” Paterno and Scott “I’m with stupid” Zimmerman – were elected by a total of 9,887 (31.13%) of the District’s 30,772 registered voters who showed up to vote in April 2013. The top vote-getter, the incumbent Zimmerman, receiving a shade more than 5,000 votes. That’s less than 17% of the total registered voters.

That modest turnout, however, still trounced the pathetic 4,588 (14.84%) of the District’s 30,924 registered voters who showed up in April 2015 to re-elect Tony “Who’s The Boss?” Borrelli and elect Mark “Help!” Eggemann, Bob “I look like a school board member, don’t I?” Johnson and Tom “Can you believe I’m a lawyer?” Sotos – with non-incumbent Eggemann leading that field with just under 2,800 votes, or barely 9% of the total registered voters.

Do the math.

Roughly 500 PREA members and D-64 administrators live and pay RE taxes here – NOT including Supt. Laurie Heinz, who carpetbags her $250,000+ per year salary and benefits out to a more distant northwest suburb where RE taxes are almost certainly lower than here. That’s basically 500 votes pretty much guaranteed for any candidate who promises to grab his/her ankles to keep those teachers and administrators happy.

Then add just one vote from each family of the almost 4,500 D-64 students who might, at the high end, be paying $5,000/year in RE taxes to D-64 for $30,000 of D-64 education for their two kids – compared to the $9,842/year tuition for two kids at St. Paul of the Cross, or the $6,930/year for two at St. Andrew’s Lutheran – and you can see why those parent-voters have little incentive to elect fiscally-responsible Board members who will stand up to the PREA’s demands and thereby risk a strike that would cause those parent-voters the inconvenience and cost of securing non-D-64 daycare for the strike’s duration.

That’s why, like Madigan and his General Assembly minions, or Rahm and his alderdopes, any D-64 Board member with designs on re-election knows that pandering to, and appeasing, public-sector unions like the PREA and bureaucrats like the D-64 administrators will also placate the parent-voters. And that basically ensures their re-election, as well as a fan club likely to endure beyond their Board terms.

With re-election and a fan club secured, who needs honesty, transparency and accountability?

We’ll talk more about this D-64 Board’s perversions of representative democracy (a/k/a the republican – small “r” – form of government) in our next post.

To read or post comments, click on title.

It has been almost two years since we first started writing – in our posts of 11.28.14 and 12.23.14 – about Park Ridge-Niles School District 64’s efforts to catch and cull non-resident “parasite” students.

So we were pleased to read a recent Park Ridge Herald-Advocate article (“12 students removed from District 64 for non-residency; background checks expanded,” 09.16.16) reporting that 12 students were removed from D-64 schools last year because it was discovered that they didn’t live in the District full-time. At a rough cost of $14,000 per student, that’s almost $170,000 a year in savings.

Upon seeing that article we went to the District’s website and found the Residency Update report that the District’s investigator is currently working on 9 more cases.

The H-A story, but not the District’s report, states that D-64 Chief School Business Official Luann Kolstad pegged the cost of the residency investigations and one formal hearing at $77,464, which seems a bit stiff. It’s also hard to understand because…SURPRISE!…the non-transparent District apparently offered the H-A reporter no explanation. And, presumably, the H-A reporter didn’t think to ask for one.

But saving the taxpayers a net $90,000+ seems to make it a worthwhile exercise and expense.

So we’re offering D-64 a rousing “Huzzah!” for getting something right.

But because yin can’t seem to exist without yang, we can’t help but note that the published agenda for this Monday night’s D-64 Board meeting includes something very wrong: “Ratification of PREA/Board Agreement.”

No Board packet has been posted on the District’s website, so we don’t know whether the opaque Board and Administration might actually deign to include the new contract among the rest of the meeting materials. But we highly doubt it.

After telling the taxpayers to pound sand for the past few weeks, it’s unlikely that Supt. Laurie Heinz would let “Boss” Borrelli and the rest of the Board lemmings do anything transparent, even something as worthless as an 11th-hour publication of the contract.

But if you don’t care about the Falcons v. the Saints on Monday night football, and are willing to risk missing the first few minutes of the Clinton v. Trump circus, swing by the Roosevelt School gym and bear witness to non-representative, Star Chamber local government at pretty much its absolute worst.

You are likely to hear Heinz, Borrelli and/or the lemmings brag about how wonderful they are, how wonderful the PREA folks are, and how wonderful the new contract is – including new spending that will make that $90,000+ savings from residency checks seem like chump change.

Then you can return home to the relative honesty and sincerity of Hill and Don.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass has often written about the secretive, unaccountable and corrupt manner in which Chicago city government, in all its various forms, does business as usual. Kass has branded it the “Chicago Way” – which, when spoken correctly, requires approximately the same distasteful inflection as “child molester.”

Roughly two weeks ago the Board and Administration of Park Ridge-Niles School Dist. 64 announced that it had reached a tentative agreement-in-principle with the Park Ridge Education Association (the “PREA”) that was being presented to the PREA membership for ratification. Once it was ratified by PREA membership, the D-64 Board would vote to approve it.

But according to a Park Ridge Herald-Advocate article (“’Tentative’ contract reached for District 64 teachers, board president says,” 08.23.16), School Board approval of that agreement would occur without the District’s taxpayers getting a chance to see, read, and comment on it in advance of the vote.

That kind of opacity and outright contempt for the taxpayers is what has become institutionalized as the “D-64 Way.”

In case you don’t quite appreciate the absurdity and arrogance of the D-64 Board’s operating in this fashion, permit us to lay it out for you.

The PREA negotiating team reached the tentative agreement-in-principle that its members (the D-64 teachers) – presumably after being given an opportunity to read the agreement – get to vote on. And for all we know, they’ve already done so.

On the other hand, the D-64 negotiating team led by Board president Tony “Who’s The Boss?” Borrelli and his ventriloquist, Supt. Laurie “I’m The Boss!” Heinz, reached that same tentative agreement-in-principle at the same time. But unlike the D-64 teachers, the District’s constituent taxpayers who will be bound to pay for that contract over the next four years aren’t even going to get to see, much less read, it before the D-64 Board votes to bind those constituent taxpayers for the next four years.

Does that sound honest, transparent and accountable? Or even sane? No, but that’s the D-64 Way.

We can find nothing in the current contract (which controlled the negotiations that produced the new contract) or in state law that requires the terms of the new tentative agreement-in-principle to be kept secret from the taxpayers once it has been released for PREA teacher ratification. Even “Boss” Borrelli admitted as much in that H-A article, noting only that the District’s “practice” supported keeping the terms of the new contract secret from the taxpayers.

That’s Borrelli’s story – most likely written for him by the District’s propaganda minister, Bernadette Tramm – and he’s sticking to it. Because that’s the D-64 Way.

But the real reason for keeping the new contract a secret from the taxpayers is that publishing it in advance of any Board vote on it substantially increases the likelihood that suspicious and/or irate taxpayers might show up at that D-64 Board meeting and ask some tough questions about the contract, and about the “Boss” and his Board that cut that deal.

Tough questions are considered “no bueno” by the “Boss,” his ventriloquist, and their lemmings on the Board…because answering tough questions and the hard-edged comments that often accompany them is not the D-64 Way.

So with the agenda for this Monday night’s “special” Board meeting stating that there will be yet another closed-session starting at 6:00 p.m. during which “collective negotiating matters between the District and its employees or their representatives…“ will be discussed, we can’t help but suspect that such a discussion might be the prelude to a vote to approve the new contract once the Board emerges from that closed session.

Especially with the PREA Governing Board conveniently scheduled to meet from 4:00 t0 6:00 p.m. that same afternoon, presumably to formally authorize the results of the ratification vote that already should have taken place.

If you think that the Illinois Open Meetings Act (“IOMA”) notice requirements for such meetings prevents such a vote, think again.

IOMA requires the posting of a meeting agenda 48 hours in advance of the meeting. The D-64 Board, therefore, has already met that requirement. And even though the agenda doesn’t expressly provide for a contract vote, the Board could still come out of closed session and vote to approve the contract. That’s because Section 2.02(a) of IOMA is written with sufficient ambiguity that enemies of transparency and accountability – i.e., a majority of the D-64 Board members – can claim that a contract approval vote is “germane to a subject on the agenda”: the collective bargaining item on the closed-session portion of that agenda.

Making up quasi-legal, or legal but dishonest, ways to fleece the taxpayers while keeping them in the dark is the D-64 Way.

And don’t think for a New York minute that the malefactors on that Board won’t do it, even if one or more (but not a majority) of them makes a grand-but-dishonest (or dishonest-but-grand?) gesture of voting against that contract – like Borrelli did four years ago – purely as political opportunism. Such theatrics are easy when they know in advance, from the earlier closed-session discussion, that their vote is meaningless because the contract already has Board majority support.

So don’t be surprised if that’s the way it goes down Monday night, with the “Boss,” the lemmings and Heinz praising the unseen contract as a masterpiece of collective bargaining, farsightedness and fairness to everybody.

Even if those of us paying the bill have no choice but to take their word for it.

Because that’s the D-64 Way.

UPDATE (09.12.16): Now that the Board packet for tonight’s (09.12.16) meeting has been published we note that the “Upcoming Meetings and Topics” section shows that “Ratification of PREA/Board Agreement” is scheduled for the September 26 meeting at Roosevelt School.

So we’ll take that at face value. For now.

Meanwhile, at least a few citizens appear to have taken it upon themselves to have FOIAed the District for the contract, term sheets, and other documents. Not surprisingly, they’ve been stonewalled with the excuse that the language of the PREA tentative agreement is “still being reviewed and edited by the PREA negotiating team and the District’s legal counsel before it can be finalized for approval and signatures” and, therefore, the agreement is exempt from FOIA disclosure under exception 7(1)(p).

We’ve also heard that some teachers have copies of the tentative agreement, but we don’t know whether those are rank-and-file PREA member-teachers or members of the PREA negotiating team.

But the bottom line here remains the same: As Borrelli acknowledged to the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate, no legal restriction prevents the District’s disclosure of the tentative agreement-in-principle, on the District’s past practice. And the FOIA exception to disclosure invoked by the District in rejecting taxpayers’ requests for copies of the contract is a voluntary one, not a mandatory one. Which means D-64 could produce that agreement if it wanted to.

It just doesn’t want to…because “Boss” Borrelli and his lemmings don’t want the scrutiny, the questions and the comments those contract terms would likely generate, at least not until AFTER the Board approves that contract and there’s nothing the taxpayers can do about it.

Whether it’s stupidity, corruption, or something else, the taxpayers of this community deserve better.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Some day we hope to be able to write something positive about the Board and Administration of Park Ridge-Niles School District 64.

Today is not that day.

For those of you who haven’t paid attention to the clown car masquerading as representative government at D-64, this past Monday night the members of the Board of Education marched out of another of their regular and customary closed-session meetings behind president Tony “Who’s The Boss?” Borrelli and collectively gave a giant middle finger to the District’s taxpayers.

First, the Board unanimously voted to give raises to all the administrators for whom Supt. Laurie “I’m The Boss!” Heinz requested them. While 1% raises based on little more than an increase in the Consumer Price Index (“CPI”) are stupid and irresponsible, the reported $48,763 cost is barely a rounding error to the District’s $70 million-plus budget. By D-64’s profligate standards, that’s almost frugal.

And according to the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate article about that meeting (“Raises approved for 19 District 64 administrators,” August 23), it came with a refreshingly honest admission from Ms. Heinz:

“Our [administrators] don’t have a union; they don’t have tenure. They have me to advocate for them. So that is what I’m here to do today.”

We’re sure glad she cleared that up because, for those of you keeping score, we now know that the administrators have Heinz advocating for them; and the teachers have their union, the Park Ridge Education Association (“PREA”), advocating for them. Those advocates have done quite well for their constituents, judging by the high-pay-without-performance they enjoy.

We taxpayers, however, are left with the likes of “Boss” Borrelli, vice-president Scott Zimmerman, Dathan Paterno, Vicki Lee, Bob Johnson, Tom Sotos and Mark Eggemann as our “advocates.”

With apologies to both President Obama and ISIS, these school board members are the real “junior varsity.”

The H-A reports that Heinz initially wanted a 1.9% pay boost for her administrators, plus something called a “market adjustment performance bonus.” That 1.9%, however, was just for optics – a wink-and-nod number contrived in one of those weekly closed-session meetings to give the Board some faux bragging rights about how tough it was in beating that 1.9% down to 1% that might fool the rubes.

The set-up for that Kabuki occurred back on August 8 when “Who’s The Boss?” and Zimm first called for CPI-based raises – even though the national CPI had risen only 0.8% over last year and the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics pegged the Chicago area’s CPI as having actually fallen by 0.1% over the past 12 months.

If “Who’s The Boss” and Zimm were on the legit, that would have meant no CPI-based raises.

But of course they weren’t.

So when residents Steve Schildwachter and Mike Reardon challenged the Board on such raises without clearly documented performance justifications, the Board spent almost 15 minutes ripping them with a variety of self-serving, undocumented ipse dixit remarks about the Board’s and Administration’s many accomplishments – all of which you can watch on the meeting video, starting at the 1:57:00 mark and running through the 2:15:00 mark.

We might blow some holes in those Board remarks in a future post, but for now we’ll stop and shift our focus from the undercard to Monday night’s main event: Borrelli’s announcement that there’s a new 4-year contract with the PREA.

Don’t expect to hear about its terms or actually read its text anytime soon, when it might actually matter – like before the Board approves it.

According to another August 23 H-A article (“’Tentative’ contract reached for District 64 teachers, board president says”) “Who’s The Boss?” stated that the contract will not be released to the public (a/k/a, the taxpayers) until after it is approved by both the PREA and the School Board, which is expected to occur next month.

According to Borrelli, the reason for that isn’t any legal requirement but merely the District’s longstanding practice of not informing the taxpayers about teacher contracts before each such contract becomes a fait accompli.

“Who’s The Boss?” thinks the taxpayers he claims to represent can’t fully appreciate the new contract, negotiated over a seven-month period in secretive closed sessions, without first having an understanding of “all the issues involved,” “the full background of it,” and “the full gist of it” – all the insights which he, his Board and the PREA prevented the taxpayers from acquiring by holding all those negotiations in closed session.

If pressed, Borrelli will insist that those closed sessions aren’t his fault, that the requirement was put into the last contract that he voted against.

But the way to tell whether Borrelli is full of Bolognese on this point – and trying to hide the new contract’s terms so that the taxpayers can’t see what a bad deal it is before it’s approved – is whether there’s a similar closed-session negotiation requirement in this new contract that will bind and gag the future board that negotiates the next contract in 2020.

By then, Borrelli will likely have left the Board and disclaimed any ownership of the high-priced mediocrity (relative to comparable districts, not to the state average and schools in Franklin Park, Calumet City or Effingham) that he and his clown-car passengers have foisted on the District’s taxpayers and students. And by then we expect Heinz to have leveraged her entry-level superintendent position here into a better gig elsewhere, presumably closer to her Vernon Hills home.

That’s why we’re willing to bet the “Boss” one crisp new $1 bill that this latest contract contains another cone-of-silence negotiations provision, along with the same old, same old automatic annual step and lane raises that reward teachers merely for continuing to show up and take some grad courses that may or may not have any measurable effect on their job performance.

Of course, that’s just speculation because the “Boss” and his Oui-Street Board don’t even try to conceal their contempt for the intelligence and public spiritedness of their constituents – especially the more than two-thirds of Park Ridge households who pay more than two-thirds of D-64s taxes but don’t even have a kid in D-64 schools – by doing something as simple and honest as publishing the new contract NOW.

Which is why they so brazenly give us a Rahm Emanuel salute:

Except with a full complement of middle-finger joints.

To read or post comments, click on title.

An article in this week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate illustrates most of what is wrong with Park Ridge-Niles School District 64, as run by School Board president Tony “Who’s the Boss?” Borrelli, his sycophantic board members, and Supt. Laurie Heinz.

The article (“Raises for District 64 superintendent, 21 administrators to go before school board,” August 16) reports that Heinz and 21 other administrators will be given raises, including “market adjustments” for those earning less than “what competitive districts pay” – “competitive districts” allegedly being what Heinz calls the “North Cook 40” (“NC40”) and claims to consist of 40 elementary and high school districts in the north/northwest suburbs of Chicago.

We say “allegedly” because the H-A article identified only Arlington Heights, Des Plaines, Kenilworth, Northbrook and Wilmette as NC40 districts.  We couldn’t find any reference to the NC40 on the D-64 website, nor could we find it through a Google search. So for all we know, the NC40 is just a figment of Heinz’s imagination.

Not surprisingly, thosse raises and “market adjustments” weren’t earned by measurably better performance either from those administrators or from the schools/students they administer. After all, this is District 64 – where they keep telling us individual performance can’t even be measured, much less rewarded.

According to the H-A article, “Boss” Borrelli justified the “market adjustments” by claiming they are “critical to keep [sic] us on par with our competitors” – without providing one iota of data about how many administrators D-64 has lost to “competitors” because of salaries over the past 5-10 years.  And that’s coming from the same guy who seems unconcerned about getting student performance and rankings “on par with our competitors.”

Board member Scott Zimmerman – who has played “Robin” to Boss Borrelli’s “Batman” every bit as eagerly as he did for John Heyde during Heyde’s “Batman” years – chipped in with the observation that tying raises to the Consumer Price Index is “fair” because, that way, “people are keeping pace with the economy.”

When The Zimmer says “people,” however, he doesn’t mean the taxpayers. He can’t be bothered to think about the many taxpayers who don’t get raises unrelated to their performance or designed to protect them from inflation. In all their years on the Board, neither Zimm nor the Boss have given a rat’s derriere about whether the taxpayers’ incomes are “fair,” or keeping pace with inflation, or leaving them able to pay the raises Heinz and finance czarina Luann Kolstad decide upon, and that the Boss and Zimm keep rubber-stamping.

The Boss’ and Zimm’s only concern is keeping D-64 employment as lucrative, unaccountable and risk-free as possible. Which is why Heinz can shamelessly get away with spouting such nonsense as: “If money were no object, the sky would be the limit in terms of what I would want to offer this group of hard-working professionals” – despite no meaningful performance results, of course.

Chalk that up to Heinz’s being able to spend Other People’s Money (“OPM”) while pawning off activity as achievement, especially her own for which she is paid substantially more than the $205,020 “base salary” which  Kolstad disingenuously slipped past a naïve reporter.

But highlighting yet more fiscal irresponsibility by D-64 management isn’t the real point of this post.

Instead we want to point out the School Board’s latest affront to transparency and accountability, as described in that H-A article. In that regard we direct your attention to the fourth paragraph of that article, which states that these raises “will first be discussed with the school board during a closed meeting” – is there any other kind that matters at D-64? – “on August 22 before a public discussion takes place.” The former clandestine event is scheduled to kick off at 6:00 p.m. with the Kabuki for public consumption starting at 7:30 p.m. after a 7:00 p.m. tour of Washington School, presumably to display the prototype of the not-really-secured vestibule that will almost certainly be added to all the other District schools in the not-too-distant future for several million dollars.

Which means the most predictable scenario is Boss Borrelli leading his lemmings out of their Star Chamber to the sound of “Hallelujahs!” for Heinz and those 21 other administrators as the prelude to the 7:30 p.m. presentment of the two resolutions first published in the Board packet for the August 8 meeting, but presumably with the blanks filled in.

That will leave any taxpayers showing up to bear witness to such folly with no practical ability to analyze the resolutions’ ink-still-wet numbers or formulate meaningful questions and complaints about them before the Board engages in that passes for “debate” and then votes to approve those resolutions. At least that’s what Monday night’s agenda is suggesting.

Ignorant and unprepared is exactly the way Borrelli and Heinz prefer their constituents, especially those constituents who might actually pose a threat to Borrelli’s and Heinz’s hegemony.

Once this administrator salary scam is signed, sealed and delivered it will be time to trot out the next scam: the brand new teachers’ contract.

Just keep an eye on the chimney of 164 South Prospect for the first sign of white smoke.

To read or post comments, click on title

A common adage from a bygone era – before anyone could make themselves a “victim” just by claiming to be one – was: “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.”

How quaint.

Nowadays, however, while truth remains a legal defense to defamation (libel and slander), truth has no similar power to defend against accusations of political incorrectness – or of being “judgmental” and saying things that are “disrespectful” and “hurtful” – no matter how unreasonable the accusation, and no matter how gossamer-thin and  fragile the accuser’s professed sensibilities.

Hence the whining and faux-outrage about our referring to certain Park Ridge residents as “freeloaders” and certain non-residents as “parasites.”

For readers not up on that vernacular, we use “freeloaders” as shorthand for a description that would otherwise require the 16 words the Merriam-Webster online uses to describe such people: “a person who is supported by or seeks support from another without making an adequate return.” Merriam-Webster lists the arguably more pejorative “bloodsucker,” “leech,“ “moocher” and “sponger” as synonyms. And although it also lists “parasite” as a synonym, we reserve that for non-resident freeloaders who can’t even claim to be paying Park Ridge RE taxes to justify their freeloading.

Not surprisingly, those descriptions offend the freeloaders and the parasites – much bright light offends cockroaches.

Like the fabled emperor who didn’t take kindly to being ridiculed by an honest young lad for walking around buck nekkid after coming to expect his subjects’ foolish awe at his glorious, albeit imaginary, raimant, freeloaders don’t take kindly to being identified as serial appropriators and abusers of Other People’s Money (“OPM”), especially when it’s coming not from far-off Washington but from their neighbors.

But our calling out freeloaders and parasites is not just a gratuitous slap at them and their ilk, or a quest for economy of verbiage. Identifying them and the problems they cause goes to the sustainability and future of Park Ridge as we know it.

How can Park Ridge remain a stable and desirable upper-middle/lower-upper class community when a significant number of residents actually seem to pride themselves on consistently taking out far more in services than they put in via taxes…and then brazenly insist on even more, especially from the schools?

They want free Chromebooks. They want no fees for anything. They want low-cost hot lunches. They want free full-day kindergarten. And that’s just for starters.

As every non-comatose resident should know, Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 spends roughly $14,000 (and rising, naturally) per pupil per year, all in. As best as we can tell from available data, however, the median Park Ridge residence is worth around $365,000 and annually pays less than $9,000 in RE taxes, of which less than $3,000 goes to D-64.

Do the math.

A young family in a median-value home putting just one child through D-64 schools for a typical 9 years (K-8) will receive $126,000 – not factoring in unknown variables like increased school costs, tax increases, inflation, etc. – of “free” education during that same 9-year period. Meanwhile, during those same 9 years that family will pay a mere $27,000 in taxes to D-64.

That’s leaves a $99,000 shortfall that will take an additional 33 years of taxpaying – in addition to those 9 educational years – for that family to equalize.

Add a second kid to the mix and that family is now taking out $252,000 of “free” education while still paying only that same $27,000 in RE taxes to D-64 – pushing the shortfall up to $225,000 and pushing the payback period out to 75 years!

Which means those Park Ridge freeloaders who like to brag on Facebook and elsewhere about how they’ll be moving out of Park Ridge the moment their kids graduate – like locusts moving on after they’ve stripped the fields and consumed everything worth consuming – will NEVER come remotely close to making up any significant part of their kids’ educational cost deficit.

And, worse yet, when that family which still “owes” $99,000 or $252,000 is excess education debt sells its Park Ridge home, it likely will be to another young family that will run up its own comparable deficits before similarly moving on. Leaving those massive debts to be covered entirely by OPM.

Which will drive up the cost for everyone NOT receiving $14,000 – or $28,000 or $42,000 – of “free” education for their $3-4-5,000 of RE taxes paid to D-64. And that will make Park Ridge economically undesirable, if not outright hostile, to all those folks providing the OPM.

Anticipating the carping this post will inspire, we wish to make clear that we share the view of author John Green that the benefit of paying taxes for public schools without actually having kids in them is that it reduces the likelihood of living with a bunch of stupid people. That doesn’t require or justify, however, paying top-shelf prices for a second-shelf product.

Keep that in mind as our overmatched D-64 School Board continues to scheme, in secretive closed session “negotiations,” with the PREA about how to put more tax money in the teachers’ pockets while demanding no more (and no better quality) work that raises the educational rankings to the levels of the Glenviews, Northbrooks and similar higher-end communities who are able to offer better-ranked schools and greater educational value at a similar cost to Park Ridge.

And then ask yourself, your friends and your neighbors this simple question:

How can this madcap tax, borrow and spend carousel that is almost totally dependent on OPM be sustainable?

To read or post comments, click on title.

As we await the white smoke from the chimney of Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 HQ signaling a new contract between the District and the teachers’ union known as the Park Ridge Education Association (“PREA”), we’ve been trying to keep our finger on the pulse of any public discussions about teachers’ pay and benefits since the contract negotiations are being conducted in secret.

So when we heard that the “Park Ridge Concerned Homeowners Group” Facebook page had a July 19 post about the same Park Ridge Herald-Advocate article we wrote about in our July 26 post, we had to check it out. And what we found was a plea of “Please don’t screw over our teachers. Please don’t screw over our teachers.”

We printed off the entire discussion as of July 30 at 5:20 p.m., all 18 pages of it, which you can read by clicking here. We encourage you to do so, if only to better understand the entitlement mentality that encourages soaring school costs and property taxes while ignoring stagnant-to-sliding performance.

The author of that FB post is someone who, judging from her many posts and comments, views moving to Park Ridge (in her case, from Chicago where her husband reportedly is a CPS teacher) and paying property taxes (reportedly among the lowest in Park Ridge) as entitling her and her family to every conceivable government service and facility…at no additional charge, of course.

Think of it as a kind of Willy Wonka golden ticket, or an all-inclusive Caribbean cruise (“Keep that cracked crab and champagne coming!”)

Despite authoring that FB post and contributing 30 or so comments to its string, however, she never articulates what exactly she means to not “screw over” the teachers. So we did some research and made a discovery that rivals the little boy’s observation about the emperor’s new clothes: were the D-64 Board to suddenly grow a collective spine and draw the line on sweetening the teachers’ employment terms by keeping in place the exact same terms of the current contract for another four years, teaching in D-64 schools would still be one of the best – if not THE best – jobs in all of Park Ridge.

How can that be? Let us count the ways.

1. This past school year D-64 teachers were required to work just 185 days out of a possible 260 work days (52 weeks x 5 days). That’s only 37 work weeks, leaving those teachers with 15 weeks of holidays and vacation. In almost every other occupation, that would be considered “part-time.”

2. Those work days can be cut back even further by paid sick and personal days: 10 sick and 3 personal per year for teachers with 1-2 years seniority; 12 sick and 3 personal during years 3-4; and 15 sick and 3 personal thereafter. So a fifth year teacher could get away with working only 167 days, giving them a whopping 18.5 weeks of holidays/vacation. Now that’s really “part time.”

3. According to the 2015-16 salary schedule for that 185 day/37-week maximum work year, salaries started at $48,582 for a rookie with only a BA degree. A 5th-year teacher with just a BA received $55,844. And a teacher with 20 years of service and just a BA got $81,526. For employees in the real world who are lucky enough to get 4 weeks off, those numbers would annualize out to $63,025, $72,443 and $105,759, respectively.

4. And how about those constitutionally-guaranteed TRS pensions? Start with a minimum of 75% of the average of the teacher’s four highest consecutive annual salaries during their last 10 years of teaching. And let’s not forget the current contract’s two annual 6%/year pre-retirement “salary spikes” that can artificially jack up those pensions even higher. So retiring even at that lowly $81,526 salary after 35 years – which can occur as early as age 57 – would yield a $61,000/year pension, which is almost $20,000/year more than the maximum Social Security benefit private sector employees get only if they hold off collecting until age 70.

5. Teachers also get better health care benefits than most of their private sector counterparts, even those who don’t have to rely on Obamacare.

Those are just a few of the simple metrics that neither the PREA nor the D-64 Board want the taxpayers to focus on, or even know about. Which is why you’ve never read them in D-64 meeting minutes or in quotes by School Board president Tony “Who’s the Boss?” Borrelli, or by any other Board members, or by the D-64 administrators, in our local newspapers.

Besides those metrics, however, are a number of intangibles that contribute substantially to making D-64 teaching jobs perhaps the best jobs in town, including:

• not having to scramble to arrange child care for all those days off school because teacher/parents have those same days off;
• not having to worry about being fired for incompetence or lack of results, because getting fired for those reasons (“cause” in private-sector parlance) is only slightly more likely than being struck by lightning…in the bathtub while eating jalapeno poppers and drinking Diet Dr. Pepper;
• the non-existent chance of the job being outsourced to Mexico or Malaysia, or even to Iowa or Indiana; and
• working in a clean, well-lighted place where the most serious job-related injury may well be a paper cut that even OSHA isn’t worried about.

Assuming one wants to teach – and even if one doesn’t – how much better a deal can one get?

Of course there are PREA teachers and their apologists who whine about how tough and stressful teaching K-8 Park Ridge kids can be. But with between 15 and 18.5 weeks of holiday/vacation time each year (not including weekends), there’s plenty of time to de-stress. Heck, our Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan get less time off than that, and they’re being bombed and shot at!

Not surprisingly, those same teachers and apologists turn apoplectic when confronted with these facts – especially when they are demanding (through their PREA negotiators) even more money, benefit enhancements, and better working conditions at the taxpayers’ expense.

Who is supposed to be looking out for the taxpayers? Why, the D-64 School Board, of course. Our elected representatives who are so proud of the job they’re doing that they do as much of it as possible – including negotiating with the PREA – in those secretive closed sessions sheltered from public scrutiny.

But if you want some insight into that Board’s taxpayer-last group-think, look no further than the colloquies of Board Member Tom Sotos in that “please don’t screw over our teachers” FB string.

Sotos starts out as Mr. Politician, trying to play both sides against the middle by claiming that “whatever happens…will be in the best interest of both the teachers…and the tax payers” while giving his assurance that the outcome will be “[a] contract that shows our appreciation to our teachers, yet respects the taxpayers who pay the bills.” He even goes all Donald J. Trump on us: “I assure you that in the end we will come out of this GREAT.”

We suspect he meant “YUGE.”

But then, under some pointed questioning, he shows his true (dark blue?) colors.

When it comes to the teachers’ part-time schedule, Sotos doesn’t want to hear about it: “I don’t think it is fair to bring in months worked as an argument in teachers [sic] salaries”; and “[t]hose teachers should never be questioned about hours worked or Summer’s offer [sic]. Ever.”

Why?

According to Sotos: “Most Teachers [sic] put in their time and do their job and in the end it comes out to the equivalent of a full day/full years [sic] worth of work.”

If you believe that, Tommy Boy has some swampland in Florida you might be interested in.

And when it comes to measuring performance and demanding accountability from teachers for the results of their work, Sotos is their lap dog: “[M]erit based pay is altogether different from what I implied in my statement”; and “It’s not fair to teachers to compare them to another profession.”

There you have it, folks, from a Board member who insists he’s looking out for the taxpayers but who sought and accepted the support of the PREA after one of its preferred candidates was thrown off the April 2015 ballot.

Part-time work with full-time pay, spring break and summers off, a gold-plated pension, and no risk or accountability whatsoever.

Sleep soundly tonight, D-64 taxpayers – Sotos is standing guard outside your henhouse.

So you can’t see your chickens getting plucked inside.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Last week the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate published an article (“District 64 board president: ‘Significant progress’ on negotiations with teachers,” July 19) consisting almost entirely of unfiltered propaganda from Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 about the interminable contract negotiations between D-64 (a/k/a the taxpayers) and the Park Ridge Education Association (the “PREA”), a/k/a, the teachers union. 

We’ve come to expect our local media serving as unquestioning conduits for whatever half-truths, misinformation and disinformation D-64 and Maine Twp. School District 207 disseminate in their quest to preserve their Teflon coatings. The next time the H-A or the Park Ridge Journal conducts any investigative reporting about either school district will be the first.

But we did get a kick out of the H-A article’s reporting Board president Tony “Who’s The Boss?” Borrelli’s proclamation that “significant progress” has occurred in the negotiations, especially given how those negotiations commenced way back on January 19 yet we’re barely a month before the expiration of the existing contract and the start of the new school year without a new contract.

It took the U.S. and North Vietnam around eight months just to agree on the shape of the bargaining table for their negotiations to end the Vietnam War, so by that pathetic benchmark these D-64 and PREA negotiators are crushing it. But by any reasonable standard, they’ve already been lapped at least twice by Team Escargot.

If D-64 and the PREA were making even half an effort, they would have met more than twice a month; and these negotiations would have been wrapped up in a couple of months. That would have given D-64 plenty of time to publish the proposed contract so that it could receive ample taxpayer scrutiny and public comment. Heck, there’s even a miniscule chance it could have been sent back for further negotiations over the more ridiculous provisions.

But among all the things on which the D-64 Board/Administration and the PREA march in lockstep, nothing surpasses their mutual dislike for public scrutiny – especially if that scrutiny reveals how irresponsibly and unaccountably the Board members are discharging their stewardship of the $70 million-plus the taxpayers give them each year.

It’s that mutual distaste for scrutiny which suggests the most likely explanation for such a glacial pace of negotiations, an explanation as nefarious as it is opaque to those on the outside of these secretive, closed-session negotiations: D-64 and the PREA have been colluding to intentionally delay the process in order to create a crisis.

By deliberately stalling the process of getting to “yes” until right before the current contract expires and school resumes, the D-64 Board and the PREA can cynically insist on lickety-split approval of whatever taxpayer-unfriendly deal they’ve cooked up – with no time left on the clock for the contract’s terms to be disclosed to the taxpayers and a meaningful opportunity given those taxpayers to question, comment on, and/or debate those terms prior to the Board’s approval of them.

It’s a strategy as clever as it is dishonest, a charade pretty much guaranteed to deceive and neuter the taxpayers while benefiting the PREA and covering – at least temporarily – the derrieres of the eight members of the D-64 negotiating team.

That way, Borrelli and his fellow bobble-heads won’t have to explain to taxpayers why they agreed to renew the current contract’s anti-transparent, anti-accountability (Article III, Section B(3)) – a provision which doesn’t expressly prohibit open-session negotiations but which uses just enough weasel-words (“Public releases must have prior mutual consent until either the Board or the PREA declares impasse…[after which] public releases or statements may be made without mutual consent provided the other party is given 48 hours’ advance notice.”) to encourage the PREA to file an unfair labor practice charge if D-64 actually tried to inform the taxpayers of the PREA’s demands and negotiating tactics.

It also means Borelli et al. will be tying the hands of the next D-64 contract negotiating team and once again keeping the taxpayers in the dark – just like Borrelli’s predecessor, John Heyde, did four years ago.

And it means the D-64 Board can approve the new contract without even showing it to the taxpayers, like Heyde and his Heydettes did four years ago.

That also means that Borrelli and the bobble-heads can renew the current contract’s “spike” provision that jacks up the salaries of near-retirement teachers by an additional 6% per year to fatten their pensions by tens (hundreds?) of thousands of dollars over their retirement– as Borrelli seemed to suggest in response to a question from resident Peter Karas at the July 18 Board meeting – with the taxpayers being none the wiser until the new contract has been approved and that spike provision has become a fait accompli.

You can watch the Karas-Borrelli colloquy, and Supt. Laurie Heinz inviting Karas to e-mail her or finance guru Luann Kolstad his questions (so that the answers never make it into the public record?), from 6:20 to 14:30 of the meeting video.

You can also watch – from 3:58 to 6:15 of that same video – how Borrelli, Heinz and the rest of that assembled multitude fail to engage taxpayer and education advocate, Joan Sandrik, when she asks them to remove the closed-session bargaining provision from the new contract. Heinz didn’t even invite Sandrik to correspond by e-mail.

That’s the way the D-64 Board operates under “Who’s The Boss?” Borrelli, much the same way it operated under the former “Boss” Heyde.

Which calls to mind a lyric from The Who’s rock anthem, “Won’t Get Fooled Again”:

“Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.”

Sadly, Borrelli has proved that painfully true.

And that taxpayers are getting fooled again.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Back in early May we published a post about the Board and Administration of Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 having entered into what appears to have been a series of NO-BID contracts worth multi-millions of dollars with vendor Arbor Management for hot lunches at Emerson and Lincoln middle schools.

And it appears as if those deals were cut in closed-session meetings that have become par for the course with the “meet the not-so-new boss (Tony Borrelli), same as the old boss (John Heyde)” Board.

So it should come as no surprise that tonight’s Board agenda has as an action item the Board’s vote on approving a new, more expansive NO BID deal with Arbor Management to provide hot lunches to the District’s five elementary schools.

In that May 3 post we noted how the District’s previous under-the-radar, no-bid deals with Arbor suggested the kind of kinkiness that characterized the no-bid deals that got former CPS supt. Barbara Byrd-Bennett indicted. Preventing that kind of kinkiness, albeit on a smaller scaled than Byrd-Bennett’s $23 million kickback scam, is exactly why no-bid contracts are required by public bodies in all but a few limited situations – food vendor contracts not being one of them to our knowledge.

So we found it curious, to say the least, that the “recommendation” memo ostensibly authored by Supt. Laurie Heinz and Financial Czarina Luann Kolstad – “ostensibly” because propaganda minister Bernadette Tramm’s fingerprints are usually all over this kind of disinformation – makes special mention (at page 2, item 3) of “advocacy for the status quo” (i.e., no District-wide hot lunch program) by one school’s “PTO leadership team” where the owner of a PTO lunch vendor is a family of a current student in that school.

That sound you hear is the pot calling the kettle black.

Ironically, the very next item on that page (No. 4) seems to be Heinz’s and Kolstad’s alibi for not going out to bid on these expanded lunch services: Arbor “are [sic] already the food service vendor of record for District 64” and, therefore, “they [sic] would not require a formal bid process.”

We don’t know when or how Arbor became “the food service vendor of record,” or if that is even a lawful designation.

And, frankly, it sounds like the same kind of dishonest hooey Heinz, Kolstad and Borrelli spouted about the Illinois Open Meetings Act back when they were advocating for the creation of two new D-64 Board committees – a “Finance Committee” and a “Building & Sites Committee,” which we wrote about in our 02.17.16 post – on which resident Joan Sandrik blew the whistle, ultimately resulting in that misguided plan being quietly dropped even though Borrelli and his dwarfs were all set to buy into it hook, line and sinker.

So just consider tonight’s vote on the NO BID hot lunch vendor deal as SSDD: Same [Stuff] Different Day. And just like the IOMA-violating committee plan, this NO BID hot lunch deal also comes without any legal opinion that endorses what appears to be an illegal deal that breaches the public trust. Again.

So we can’t wait to see which of Borrelli’s dwarfs join him in this latest abuse of power, and what kind of alibis they will come up with to justify their rubber-stamping of this perversion. Odds-on favorites in that category are Zimmerman, Lee and Johnson, whose heads start bobbling the moment they walk into a Board meeting room and rarely ever stop.

The only real question is whether, in following Borrelli, they sing “Hi ho” or simply “moo.”

To read or post comments, click on title.