In our 12.31.15 post we warned about the new teachers contract that would be devised by Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 and the Park Ridge Education Association (“PREA”), a mis-match on the order of Muhammed Ali v. Zora Folley.

And in case you don’t grasp the metaphor, the PREA is Ali.

One of the big differences between Ali–Folley and PREA–D-64 is that, while the former bout was held before a jam-packed Madison Square Garden, the latter is being staged in the secrecy of closed-session meetings – the legacy of the 2012 contract offered by then-D-64 Board president John Heyde and sidekick Pat Fioretto as just another favor to a PREA that most definitely doesn’t ever want D-64 taxpayers hearing either the teachers’ demands or their responses to any D-64 counters, however insipid the latter might be.

So while this year’s “negotiations” – if you can legitimately use that term for ankle-grabbing on command – have been going on for weeks (months?), taxpayers have been kept in such darkness by the D-64 (a/k/a, the D-64 taxpayers’) “negotiating” team that we don’t even know what round it is. And we most likely won’t know a thing until (mixing metaphors) the white smoke emerges from the D-64 chimney and the respective sides’ sycophants and/or spinmeisters begin chanting “Habemus contracta!”

If past is prologue, the taxpayers won’t even see that contract until after it is ratified by PREA membership and approved by the D-64 Board. Four years ago, the new contract didn’t appear on the D-64 website until months after it was appproved, after it was posted on the PREA website.

One easy way to tell if the “fix” was in (returning to the boxing metaphor), however, is to see whether the D-64 team of Supt. Laurie Heinz, Board pres. Tony Borrelli and Board v.p. Scott Zimmerman chose to bake yet another secret negotiations provision into the new contract in order to ensure yet another Star Chamber negotiation for the next contract.

We’re betting “Yes!” Actually, we’re betting “Hell yes!”

Once you find that secrecy provision in the new contract you can also bet there is a new set of those “step” (seniority-based) and “lane” (continuing education-based) increases unrelated to any actual merit. That’s because seniority and continuing education, however irrelevant and ineffective in producing improved student performance and achievement, are what’s important to the PREA and to the D-64 Board. Which means the D-64 team happily threw in the towel on that part of the contract, too.

Keeping teacher (and administrator) compensation disconnected to merit and achievement appears to be one of the main reasons why D-64 maintains total radio silence about those inconvenient truths: (a) its students’ test scores don’t measure up to comparable districts; (b) its schools’ rankings are inferior to the schools of those other districts; and (c) its educational mediocrity may be adversely impacting Maine South’s performance. Ignoring those truths reduces the chances of D-64’s having to explain them to the folks paying for the underachievement.

Meanwhile, the only report we’ve heard about the “negotiations” appeared in an article about the D-64 budget in last week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Budget discussion continues in District 64,” June 14), in which Board president Borrelli stated that the parties are “currently working on salaries in negotiation.”

Translation: They are currently working on how much more the teachers will be paid for no greater effort or objectively-measurable results.

Interestingly enough, the focus of that H-A article was how the District is stripping $10 million out of its working cash fund so that it can pay cash for upcoming capital projects instead of going to referendum – and thereby giving the taxpayers a voice in whether and/or which such capital projects should be done.  Avoiding actual taxpayer votes on taxing and spending is a D-64 tradition since at least 1997, when D-64 was forced into the “Yes/Yes” referendum to build the new Emerson Middle School and increase the operating levy – only to discover a few years later that it apparently had failed to adequately budget for Emerson’s debt service and operations.

The result: by 2003 the District was annually popping up on the Illinois State Board of Education’s financial “early warning” or “financial watch” lists – a highly-problematic situation that the District downplayed while sneakily issuing $5 million of back-door “working cash bonds” to replenish its diminished fund balances in 2005 until it could crank up its propaganda machine to promote the multi-million dollar “Citizens For Strong Schools” referendum in 2007.

Based on D-64’s “2015-2016 Tentative Fund Balance June 30, 2016” that stripped out $10 million of working cash will reduce the District’s projected working cash balance by 66%, and leave the overall fund balance at $40,537,045 – giving the District a cushion of approximately 57% of its annual operating expenses, still well above its professed objective of “33% (4 months (120 days) of operating expense).”

So if the District’s professed objective is 33% of operating expenses, what’s the reason for it hanging onto an overall fund balance which, even after taking that $10 million working cash fund hit, will still be 73% above that objective?

Can you say “Slush fund”? We knew you could.

Now, can you say “Produced by year after year of maximum tax levies”? Well done!

Sitting on such a huge pile of extra cash (which the taxpayers otherwise would have in their own pockets, bank accounts or investment accounts) makes it so much easier for the D-64 Board and administrators to spend big chunks of it without having to get taxpayer approval via referendum. And those big chunks can be spent without the taxpayers really even noticing that it’s being spent, and what they’re getting in return for that spending.

As the old saying goes: “A slice off a cut loaf is rarely missed.” Or, in D-64’s case, a lot of slices. And that’s just another way that D-64 remains non-transparent and un-accountable to those taxpayers.

Now, bring on the next Star Chamber discussion of another Heinz contract extension and raise!

To read or post comments, click on title.

It was just two years ago that Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 rolled out its new Chromebook-based curriculum to great fanfare and applause, almost all of which was generated by the D-64 Board and Administration.

We wrote about it in our 07.21.14 post and our 08/26/14 post.

The Chromebooks were going to be the latest “magic bullet” for raising the District’s stagnant-to-sliding academic performance – as demonstrated by those pesky standardized test that provide those annoying objectively-measurable test results. Or maybe they were only intended to be $778,000 worth of new shiny objects to divert attention away from those test scores and related rankings.

Anybody who dared question the power and accuracy of this latest “magic bullet” was ridiculed as old fashioned, an unenlightened naysayer, and/or anti-child. That’s the strategy of choice by the “professional” education establishment, although just typing those words makes us laugh.

So far, however, we’ve neither seen nor heard about any improvement in academic performance. And if one entertains the possibility that the performance of Maine South students is affected by the educational quality of its D-64 feeder schools, the slide in Maine South’s performance becomes a tad ominous.

So we have to shake our head over a recent Park Ridge Herald-Advocate article reported (“All Chromebooks to be replaced in District 64, officials say,” May 2) how all of the District’s 2,782 “Generation 1” Chromebooks are going to be replaced, reportedly free of charge, with “Generation 2” Chromebooks by the manufacturer, Dell. The reason: more than half of them underwent repairs just this year alone, including a 25% breakdown rate for the computers’ logic boards.

The H-A article places the District’s cost of those repairs at $103,000 worth of parts and labor. So far, there’s no word from D-64 as to whether Dell will reimburse the District for those costs.

Two years ago the chief D-64 propagandist, Bernadette Tramm – still on the job today, sad to say – and a coterie of her sub-spinners were assuring anyone who would listen that those Generation 1 Chromebooks would have a four-year life cycle. Less than two full years later, however, Mary Jane Warden, the District’s director of innovation and instructional technology, and Finance Czarina Luann Kolstad are singing a very different tune.

“Expecting a product like a Chromebook to last a full four years of wear and tear may be too ambitious to sustain.”

What a difference two years makes.

We can’t figure out how Warden and the District’s other tech gurus didn’t see this coming two years ago because, according to Warden’s and Kolstad’s memo to the D-64 Board, “the Chromebooks are so new to the market, [and] there has been no history of product reliability or performance that we can put full confidence in.” But two years ago there was even less of a history.

Not surprisingly, that didn’t stop Warden from recommending the purchase of, or our School Board members and administrators from spending $778,000 of the taxpayers’ money on, 2,782 of the untried and unreliable critters.

And now they’re going to replace the Generation 1 Chromebook with Generation 2 Chromebooks, even though – according to Warden – Dell has not explained why the Generation 1s failed.

“I’m confident going forward we’ll have a better product,” she told the school board.

Just as confident as she was two years ago.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Over the weekend we were working on a post about Park Ridge-Niles School District 64’s replacement of all its 2,782 Chromebooks after more than half of them underwent repairs just this year alone, according to an article in last week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“All Chromebooks to be replaced in District 64, officials say,” May 2).

But then we received an over-the-transom gift: a forwarded e-mail from D-64 Supt. Laurie Heinz announcing “a new style of online forum called Thoughtexchange.”

With apologies to The Who: Meet the new cooked survey, same as the old cooked survey.

That caused us to look at the Report for tonight’s Board Meeting, where we discovered even more propaganda about this new Thoughtexchange survey in Appendix 4 – starting with all the usual buzzwords and phrases designed to excite and mesmerize the usual simpletons, like “very innovative new format,” “online outreach tool,” “various stakeholder groups,” “360-degree online dialogue” (Wouldn’t that be talking in circles?), “very engaging,” “fresh approach” and “engage them in the process,” all of which we’ve highlighted in yellow for your convenience.

According to Heinz and the District’s propaganda minister, Bernadette Tramm, the Thoughtexchange process got an “enthusiastic response” from Heinz’s handpicked “Community Relations Council.” And we would expect no less of the CRC, which we wrote about in our 10.08.15 post. In fairness, not every one of those CRC members are stooges or shills for Heinz, but you can be sure that one of the reasons Heinz picked them in the first place was that she subscribes to the “We don’t want nobody that nobody sent” Chicago-style of politics – as do most bureaucrats in this corrupt state.

And the reason Chicago-style bureaucrats pick stooges and shills is that they tend not to have the ability and/or the desire to detect all the “bullsh*t” – as Jon Stewart so keenly and eloquently elucidated it in his final monologue (see the video here, read the transcript here) last August – that is regularly dispensed by the likes of the D-64 Board and Administration. Or to actually possess the courage to say something even if they did detect it.

Notwithstanding all of Heinz’s and Tramm’s buzzwords and phrases in Appendix 4, we’ve highlighted the real b.s. in orange, starting with calling the result of this goat rodeo “a satisfaction survey that can be used primarily with staff and parents.” [Emphasis added.]

That’s because this survey is being designed to pander to the basest concerns and desires of the folks with the most to gain from manipulating the process to justify spending even more money with no better results: “staff,” who already appear to be overpaid based on D-64’s lackluster (if not declining) performance – as measured by standardized testing, not intramural havel-gazing – yet are in the process of negotiating for more, more, more; and “parents” for whom money is no object so long as they can get away with paying only around 25 cents on the dollar in RE taxes for the D-64 $14-15,000 education for their first kid, and ZERO for every additional kid.

That’s one big reason why “[a]ll parents and staff will receive direct email invitations to participate” in this survey “through May and into early June.” That way, D-64 can hope to receive as many of those special-interest responses as possible (and as few of the regular taxpayer responses as possible) before the District announces the latest sweetheart contract it has been negotiating in secret with the teachers union – a report about which is listed on tonight’s meeting agenda as one of two items scheduled for a special two-hour secretive closed session, starting at 5:30.

Will dinner be served…at taxpayer expense?

And don’t think it’s any coincidence that neither Heinz’s e-mail nor Appendix 4 lists any of the “3 open-ended questions about our schools and District” the Thoughtexchange survey allegedly will be asking, even though those questions must already have been vetted by the Board (or at least we would hope so, although we can’t find any evidence of it) and are locked and loaded if the plan is to collect all the responses “through May and early June.” By not listing the questions, it’s a lot tougher for our flummoxed local media (or any pesky bloggers and taxpayers) to shoot holes in them before the answers start rolling in.

So we’ll offer three open-ended questions of our own, just for grins:

1. Why has D-64’s standardized testing performance been stagnant-to-declining compared to other districts with similar economic profiles and per-student spending?

2. How will D-64 schools help Park Ridge taxpayers maintain and increase their property values in the face of those stagnant-to-declining comparables while RE taxes keep increasing?

3. Why does the D-64 Board keep rewarding administrators and staff with more money for stagnant-to-declining student performance?

Don’t expect those questions, or anything like them, being asked by Thoughtexchange.

And as best as we can tell from perusing the Thoughtexchange.com website, what we can expect is another typical collection of easily-manipulable anonymous data points collected through a process that might not even be immune to the kind of “ballot-box stuffing” – multiple responses by the same people – that characterize all those half-baked SurveyMonkey surveys and Change.Org. petitions so many of our local elected officials and bureaucrats prefer for their finger-to-the-wind management decisions.

The sad truth is that this isn’t even intended to be a legitimate “community” survey focusing on what two-thirds (or more) of Park Ridge households who DON’T have kids in D-64 schools think about D-64. It’s a charade and a  propaganda exercise by a dishonest Administration conspiring with a bumbling School Board to cover up the District’s pitiful lack of educational, managerial and financial competence.

And, worst of all, it cheats both the taxpayers AND the students.

To read or post comments, click on title.

One thing the Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 Board and Administration have proved themselves quite adept at is distracting attention away from the District’s lackluster (compared to other upper-income communities) academic performance and directing that attention at semi-meaningless issues.

This current side show is a school-run hot lunch program for the District’s five elementary schools.

As reported in last week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“District 64 board rejects hot lunch program for elementary schools,” April 28), Supt. Laurie Heinz and Finance Czarina Luann Kolstad want to institute a hot lunch program in all five K-5 schools similar to what is currently in place at Emerson and Lincoln middle schools.

Despite some decent Googling, we could not find any hits for local newspaper articles reporting on why and how Emerson and Lincoln middle schools got their hot lunch programs. But by reading through a bunch of School Board meeting minutes we discovered (in the April 5, 2010 minutes) that Arbor Management, Inc. was “selected in June 2009.” Unfortunately, the District’s meeting minutes on its website don’t go back to 2009, so we can’t tell if that selection process was the result of competitive bidding or some sweetheart no-bid deal.

The March 18, 2013 minutes indicate that the original contract was for five years and would have expired during the 2013-14 school year. We also discovered a vendor report for that same school year showing that D-64 paid Arbor $538,647.

Not too shabby for what may have been a no-bid contract.

But after Arbor picked up around $2.5 million over those five years of its contract, did our representatives on the D-64 Board even think about putting the contract out to bid again?

Shirley, you jest!

At the March 24, 2014 meeting the Tony Borrelli-led Board unanimously extended the Arbor contract on the consent agenda, without even any discussion – unless the discussion went on in one of D-64’s trademark secretive closed sessions.

And they did the very same thing at the February 23, 2015 meeting.

So when we heard that Heinz and the Czarina now want to give Arbor an additional no-bid $1 million/year deal for the elementary schools, while spending $90,000 to facilitate Arbor’s servicing of those schools, we started wondering about just who might know whom.

Because this sounds like a chapter right out of the kinky Barbara Byrd Bennett/CPS playbook.

Heinz’s and Kolstad’s recommendation allegedly was based on a March 2015 survey of over 1,000 respondents, 65% of whom supported such a program even though that survey – in typical local government style – made no mention of what the per-meal cost would be. That’s like asking somebody whether they want a new Mercedes (“YES!”) without telling them it will cost them $100,000 (“Um…er…maybe not right now, thanks.”).

Not surprisingly, the survey results, and especially the 373 comments that go with it, highlight the shortcomings of this kind of “don’t tell ’em the cost” proposal, as well as the unrealistic expectations of too many parents who want somebody else to make their kids’ lunch but also want the program to operate like a restaurant (e.g., “A daily lunch program that is available regardless of if you signed up ahead of time would make my life so much easier”), albeit a health-food restaurant (“Organic, low carb and include steamed or raw veggies and fruit”; “Dye free and no high fructose corn syrups, etc.”).

Of course, many parents also want that cost to be “reasonable” without saying exactly what “reasonable” means to them. But judging from all the whining that regularly occurs every time some of these folks have to pay a modest fee in connection with their kids’ $14,000 “free” educations, “reasonable” is likely to be defined by “How much of the cost can we push onto our fellow taxpayers?”

Amazingly, however, the Heinz/Kolstad proposal was rejected by Board president Tony Borrelli and his usually complicit rubber-stamp Board, reportedly because of the cost of the program to the District, staffing concerns and concerns about food waste.

That’s puzzling, considering that the cost of the program shouldn’t be a factor if the participating parents pay the fully-loaded costs of the program, including ALL costs attributable to staffing, utilities, etc. And why should the costs be a concern in light of the Finance Czarina’s projections of an annual program surplus of about $69,000?

Could it be because even these rubber-stamp Board members realize that the Czarina’s projections of an average lunch costing $3.75 and 50% participation at each school are total bull-shinola?

Or all those Board members except Bob Johnson, apparently, who voted for it while arguing that school-provided hot lunches “could result in better nutrition than what they’re bringing to school today.” Because, of course, schools that can’t seem to educate their students on par with other comparable districts have nothing better to do than also take on the parents’ nutritional duties.

Park Ridge isn’t Englewood or Lawndale, where even a pedestrian school meal might be the only decent food those students get each day. If a D-64 parent can’t slap some bologna between two slices of bread – or lovingly lay a grilled salmon filet with dill sauce into a ciabatta roll – and stick it in a bag with some chips and an apple, that’s the parent’s problem.

It shouldn’t become the District’s or the District’s taxpayers’ problem just because Heinz is looking to curry favor with parents while ringing up some kind of faux-accomplishment to excuse her failure to move the needle on student performance and justify another contract extension and raise like she got last year.

Negotiated in secretive closed sessions, Borrelli-Board style, of course.

To read or post comments, click on title.

One sure sign that appointed or elected officials are way over their skis, or just haven’t done their homework, is when they ask “What are other communities doing?” – before they express their opinion on some difficult or controversial issue.

Implicit in such a question is not only the official’s cluelessness about the issue being debated but, also, the official’s foolish belief that other governmental bodies are doing things the right way AND that they have developed methodologies that can be successfully replicated elsewhere.

Look around Cook County and its collar county communities, however, and you’ll be hard pressed to find any local governments that are actually doing things “right,” much less doing them in a reproducible or transferable way.

But if another object lesson on that point is needed, it was provided in last Thursday’s Chicago Tribune editorial, “When a suburban Chicago school district loses its way — and its money” (April 14) about the under-the-radar waste and mismanagement at the Lincoln-Way High School District, a situation that should resonate with anybody who pays the lion’s share of their property taxes to support the schools.

The editorial noted how Lincoln-Way taxpayers either were kept in the dark or chose to remain oblivious about the overspending, sweetheart deals and outright corruption at the highest level of that district’s administration. But that all changed when a group of parents – upset by the closing of one of the schools – began some aggressive investigating and even filed a lawsuit alleging, among other things, that the school board voted to close one school in order to keep Illinois State Board of Education officials from reviewing the district’s finances.

What they discovered was that the school superintendent was given a $368,148 annuity account (a/k/a, a slush fund?) above and beyond his generous salary. And that he wasted bundles of tax dollars on personal expenses.

Adding insult to injury was the fact that, having finally been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, he retired to a pension of around $312,000 a year.

That’s right: a $312,000 pension…based on salary increases that seem totally unrelated to objectively-measurable school performance. And that pension will increase by 3% per year until its recipient finally takes his dirt nap.

Worse yet, all that overspending and corruption occurred right under the very noses of elected school board members, a gang of seven which the editorial board considered so lax and clueless it wrote the following:

“Really, you have to wonder if school board members read any agenda items before approving them. Perhaps a zombie checkup is in order.“

That’s because school boards, more than any other local governmental bodies, seem to attract the simple-minded “pleasers” – folks who see their main duty as keeping teachers and administrators happy while unquestioningly buying into whatever propaganda they are fed by those very same teachers and administrators.

Which is why the most trenchant observation made in that Tribune editorial is applicable to all public bodies, but especially school boards:

Too often, school board members don’t understand that their role is not to pal around with administrators but to serve as a check on these day-to-day executives.

We don’t know if D-64 Board members “pal around” with Supt. Laurie Heinz, Finance Czarina Luann Kolstad, or other top administrators, including school principals. But the timid, obsequious and servile ways in which those Board members deal with Heinz, et al. is reminiscent of the Scarecrow, the Tinman and the Cowardly Lion approaching the great and powerful Oz.

We wrote about their collective unctuousness and butt-smooching less than a year ago (in our 06.22.15 post) when, after an unremarkable first year by Heinz as superintendent, Board president Tony Borrelli choreographed a clown-car ballet of board members falling all over themselves to unanimously vote to extend Heinz’s original three-year contract an extra year as the first year of it expired. That’s a guaranteed $250K-plus reward for, as best as we can tell, no significant objectively-measurable improvement in student performance.

Only in professional sports and public employment can mediocre performance get you a contract extension.

And, even worse, virtually all of the discussions about her performance and the extension – including her allegedly glowing “evaluations” that still do not appear to have seen the light of day – were conducted in…wait for it…closed sessions.

Once again we remind our readers that closed sessions are NEVER REQUIRED under the Illinois Open Meetings Act, even though they have become a regular feature of D-64 Board meetings. So even when citizens attend meetings, or watch the meeting videos, much/most of the heavy lifting on important issues is often done by the Board after it goes into hiding.

And when Board members do emerge from hiding and attempt to create the appearance of transparency, citizens who address the Board more often than not receive a “talk to the hand” response, especially if they dare say things those officials don’t want to hear. See, e.g., the Board’s and administration’s response (Borrelli: “Anybody else?”) to Joan Sandrik’s spot-on comments at the 2:31:30 mark of the March 21, 2016 meeting video about not trusting anything the District’s architects, FGM, say.

Which might explain, at least in part, why handfuls-and-more of folks will show up at City Council meetings while most D-64 (and Maine Twp. High School District 207) Board meetings play to empty rooms – even though the D-64 Board spends about the same amount of money educating less than 5,000 kids as the Park Ridge City Council spends on running the whole City of 37,000-plus people.

Unfortunately, scarecrow Board members and empty meeting rooms are an invitation, if not a recipe, for Lincoln-Way style results.

Which seem to get discovered only after the superintendent qualifies for retirement.

And only after several of his enabler board members resign.

To read or post comments, click on title.

We just saw the April 1, 2016 statistic-based comment on the Park Ridge Concerned Homeowners Group FB page by resident Josh Kiem, made in response to the March 22 post by Kathy Panattoni Meade about Park Ridge-Niles School District 64’s plan to spend $8-$10 million on not-really-secured vestibules.

Kiem cited a Wikipedia compendium of school shootings since 1764. Not shooting deaths, mind you, just shooting incidents. And he decided to focus on shooting data from 1990 to the present. Basically 25 years.

The statistics he found will likely surprise nobody but the usual flock of Chicken Littles who think kids – or at least their kids – deserve to be bubble-wrapped and garage kept, at the taxpayers’ expense; and most members of the D-64 Board and Administration, who apparently were born without the common sense gene.

According to the Wikipedia post, from 1990 to 2015, there were 7 shooting incidents in elementary schools and only 35 such incidents in middle schools. That’s 42 incidents over 25 years in schools like D-64’s. Or an average of 1.7 incidents per year throughout a system of 66,689 elementary and middle schools.

Frankly, that minimal level of risk doesn’t even justify the $840,000 the D-64 Board voted, at its March 21 meeting, to spend this summer on a not-really-secured vestibule just for Washington School.

That doesn’t matter to Supt. Laurie Heinz and the District’s new business czarina Luann Kolstad, neither of whom pay Park Ridge property taxes while reaping fat salaries and benefits funded by people who DO pay those property taxes. But expect Heinz and Kolstad to cite these “security achievements” as performance achievements when it comes time for another one-year, one quarter-million dollar-plus contract extension and raise (Heinz) and raise to her solidly six-figure salary (Kolstad) – even though neither Heinz nor Kolstad seem able to improve either student performance on benchmark standardized tests, or the related rankings of the District’s schools against schools in comparable communities.

That’s because improving academic performance is a lot tougher and uncertain than blowing $8-10 million on brick and mortar.

Meanwhile, these not-really-secured vestibules won’t make the D-64 schools measurably more secure against a student, parent, teacher, repairman or deliveryman who gains access to the schools with a MAC-10, a ball bearing-filled suicide vest, or even a knife or two.

We’re not saying that reconfiguring entranceways so that they funnel visitors into the school’s office is not what currently passes for a “best practice.” But unless that office is operated like a sally port that can effectively lock in armed visitors – assuming they can be identified as “armed” – funneling them into it doesn’t prevent those visitors from opening fire in there before extending the carnage to the rest of the building.

And it does nothing to detect weaponry being carried in by off-kilter students or teachers.

Throwing big money at not-really-secured vestibules, however, does meet the purely political needs of school administrators like Heinz and Kolstad, and Board members like Tony Borrelli, Scott Zimmerman, Vickie Lee and Bob Johnson – who voted 4-2 (Mark Eggemann and Tom Sotos “no,” Dathan Paterno MIA), to appear to be doing something about school safety, no matter how half-baked and cost-ineffective that something might be. And new brick-and-mortar becomes a convenient and tangible prop with which those administrators and Board members can dazzle gullible residents.

Ask yourself: Is this the best way D-64 can spend $8-10 million of the taxpayers’ money? Or even the $860,000 for Washington’s not-really-secured vestibules?

If your answer is “no,” then it’s time you contacted Borrelli, Zimmerman, Lee and Johnson to demand they make a motion to reconsider (only somebody who voted for the Washington School boondoggle can move to reconsider) at the Board’s next meeting and then vote to kill this stupid and wasteful expenditure.

But if your answer is “yes,” you’re probably already spending a fortune on bubble-wrap.

To read or post comments, click on title.

If you believe the propaganda Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 Supt. Laurie Heinz, Chief School Business official Luann Kolstad, and a majority of the Tony Borrelli-led D-64 Board has been spouting about the state of “security” at the District’s eight school buildings, the under-secured entrances to each of those schools currently put every schoolchild at risk of being injured or killed by:

(a) an “active shooter” like Sandy Hook’s Adam Lanza;

(b) some unbalanced parent looking to settle a custody or child-support score with a Glock;

(c) a radical extremist deliveryman wearing a suicide vest; or

(d) whatever other threat a fertile imagination can conjure up.

So, what are that Board and Administration doing to address these threats that, according to them, exist right here, right now…today?

NOTHING!

If you want or need proof of such recklessness, look no further than the meeting video of last Monday (03.21.16) night’s Board meeting.

Once again, the topic was “security” – assuming you can use that term with a straight face when discussing the not-really-secured vestibules on which D-64 wants to spend $8-10 million of our tax dollars. More accurately, however, much of the meeting dealt with the seemingly bogus-and-escalating cost estimates foisted upon this gullible Board by the District’s architect of record FGM Architects (“FGM”) and construction manager Nicholas & Associates (“Nicholas”), heavily aided and abetted by Heinz and Kolstad.

In just 18 days – since March 3rd – the projected costs of those vestibules has reportedly soared a whopping $807,000 from FGM’s/Nicholas’ previous $6.9 million figure. And that $6.9 figure itself was a boxcar increase from the dynamic duo’s initial $5.1 million projection last November.

This vestibules project has gone so far off the rails, so quickly, that even a dependable rubber stamper like Board member Scott Zimmerman balked at the 66% cost escalation – claiming that “I’ve never seen a miss like that” by FGM and Nicholas, before calling what they produced a “half-baked pie.”

Given the funny numbers tossed about at that meeting and mentioned in the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate’s account of it (“District 64 struggles to balance school security upgrades with high price tag,” March 22) – $7.1 million, $8.9 million, or $10.1 million – we’re not sure any of those numbers is remotely close to real.

Yet Heinz, Kolstad, Borrelli and a majority of the Board weren’t going to let FGM’s/Nicholas’ cost WAGuess-timates stop them from finding some way of moving this ill-conceived and profligate project forward that same night. They made that clear by the two alternative motions (A” and “B”) contained in the Board packet, as well as by numerous comments made during the discussion.

Which is why we want to send a big Watchdog bark-out to resident Joan Sandrik, who showed up to once again speak truth to power – albeit this embarrassingly low-voltage School Board and Administration.

Check out the video (starting at the 2:31:30 mark) to see and hear how Sandrik pulled no punches, opening with a head-snapping left jab of “I don’t trust the architects” followed by a right hook of “I don’t trust anything they say.”

BAM!

In response to the cost escalation of these not-very-secured vestibules, Sandrik quite reasonably asked whether the architects “have…given us a Rolls Royce when all we need is a Buick?”

Although we haven’t seen FGM’s or Nicholas’ contracts with the District, the general rule of thumb is that the more “Rolls Royce” brick-and-mortar projects the District does, the more money flows into FGM’s and Nicholas’ bank accounts. That means it’s in their economic interest – as it has been for D-64’s “security” consultant, RETA Security, Inc. – to peddle as much panic as possible. And the District’s senior administrators and Board majority have been all over that panic-peddling like cats in heat, desperate for some catnip.

$8-$10 million worth of catnip.

Listen to Heinz’s five-minute aluminum siding pitch (starting at 22:40 of the meeting video) in which she invokes the opinion of “numerous security experts” (un-named and therefore un-verifiable) before panic-peddling the “active shooter scenario” (it “could happen”) and then shifting the focus of the vestibules to a more innocuous controlled-movement purpose: restricting where people go once they get inside.

Memo to Heinz: If you don’t have metal detectors at the school entrances, you can’t prevent people from bringing in concealed firearms and ammo. Or a suicide vest filled with ball bearings and metal shrapnel.

And unless you have school personnel escorting visitors (e.g., parents, siblings, grandparents, deliverymen, repairmen, etc.) to whatever room or area of the building he/she is authorized to visit, you have no practical ability to control where that person goes – assuming they have a specific target in mind rather than the desire for random acts of carnage.

Which is why we have to also send a Watchdog bark-out to Board member Tom Sotos, who suggested (starting at 1:10:25 of the meeting video) that the District look into the comparative value of posting an armed security guard at each school entrance for the next 10 years instead of spending roughly the same $8-$10 million on these not-really-secured vestibules.

And another bark-out goes to Board member Mark Eggemann for proposing a referendum on the question of whether a majority of taxpayers casting votes on the issue would support spending multi-millions of dollars on not-really-secured vestibules. He also joined Sotos in calling out Heinz, Kolstad and Borrelli for their insistence on rushing to judgment with a decision while so many options remain under-explored:

“We came here with [options] A and B, and now we’ve got C, D, E and F,” noted Eggemann.

While that kind of reasoning couldn’t completely deter the majority of this Board from blowing taxpayer money, however, it did cause at least a temporary downsizing of the project to a “pilot program” of one school – Washington – which will get about $428,000 of “critical infrastructure” and an $840,000 not-really secured vestibule.

If you believe the Board’s and Administration’s propaganda, that leaves the other seven schools, their students and their teachers sitting ducks for shooters, bombers and various other assorted n’er-do-wells.

It also begs the question of how the District will measure the success of this “pilot” program? Perhaps with an announcement like:

“The new secured $840,000 vestibule at Washington has been every bit as successful at keeping out random active shooters and ISIS terrorists as its predecessor vestibule, so we’re declaring the pilot program a success and rolling out the vestibule program for all the schools”?

Actually, that might be about as forthcoming as D-64 historically has been about the success and failure of many/most of its “pilot” programs.

Despite his professed concern over FGM’s and Nicholas’ 66% cost underestimate, Zimmerman happily endorsed the “pilot program.” So did Board member Vickie Lee, whose predictably mindless support for almost anything and everything the D-64 administration proposes was demonstrated once again by her thinking-is-too-hard “we hired experts” two-minute monolog, starting at 1:43:35 of the meeting video.

So Borrelli and Board member Bob (“Inaction guarantees inequality”) Johnson joined Lee and Zimmerman to approve that pilot program, with Sotos and Eggemann voting “no” and Dathan Paterno MIA. That means Washington will be getting its $840,000 not-really-secured vestibule this summer.

If you’ve got about two hours to spare, and a high pain threshold, you really should try watching the whole “vestibules” segment of the meeting video to see for yourself what passes for informed and intelligent deliberation about multi-million dollar expenditures at D-64. And if your pain threshold is low, you might want to accompany the viewing with an adult beverage of choice, holding the fixings for one or two reinforcements in reserve in case additional numbing is needed.

But whether you finish the video before your beverages finish you, one thing is troublingly clear: This whole not-really-secured vestibules program appears to be, basically, a multi-million dollar fraud.

Either that, or this Board and Administration are AT THIS VERY MOMENT recklessly and callously endangering the lives and safety of thousands of children, teachers and administrators by leaving all these currently under-secured schools “as is” – without trained and armed security personnel on-site to address all the alleged threats and dangers.

You can’t have it both ways, D-64. You’re either lying about the danger, or you’re totally reckless and irresponsible in dealing with it.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Over the course of our many years of writing about local government, we’ve often used the terms “stupid,” “dishonest” and “irresponsible” to describe various ideas, actions and people. To the best of our knowledge, however, we have never used all three to describe one idea, action or person.

Today we get to plow new ground.

Our jumping-off point is an article in this week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate titled “District 64 approves $2.2 million roof repair plan”   (March 8), which superficially addresses some of the ways D-64’s architect of record, FGM Architects, and its construction management firm, Nicholas and Associates, are planning to generate some fat fees for themselves by selling all sorts of construction projects to such a bovine School Board and Administration that the members would follow a cow with a bell around its neck.

That’s because this School Board, like its predecessors, seems to lack the thing that D-64 brags about teaching its students: critical thinking.

That lack of critical thinking is why the Board members so quickly and so unthinkingly said “Yes!” when the architects, the District’s “security” consultants – to whom everything is a security threat, just like to a hammer everything is a nail – and our local constabulary recommended $6.9 million of “secured vestibules” that really won’t protect the students, faculty and administrators from any kid, any parent, or any visitor from strolling in with one or more knives or guns under their clothing or in their backpacks.

Nor will they protect the assembled multitude from some suicide vest-wearing terrorist, if that’s your preferred bogey-man du jour.

Which is why we criticized such stupid and dishonest expenditures in our posts of 11.10.15 and 11.23.15.

But such criticism didn’t deter the herd mentality of this Board – or deter Board president Tony Borrelli from making such hollow-as-a-drum proclamations of competence and fiscal responsibility as his latest canard: “We’re doing our job by flipping over every rock and looking at every alternative.”

That’s just plain nonsense, of course, and probably dishonest to boot.

This Board and administration would need Google Maps and a GPS system just to find the rocks worth flipping. And then they wouldn’t flip them for fear that they’d find even more evidence and arguments against their stupid not-really-secured vestibule concept that, without metal detectors, won’t be able to screen for and detect guns, knives and the ball bearings that tend to be the shrapnel of choice for explosive-vest bombers.

But where the stupid and the dishonest meet up with the irresponsible is demonstrated by a quote from Board member Tom Sotos, in response to a suggestion by Board member Vickie Lee to get new bids for the highest-cost secured vestibule at Lincoln Middle School, thereby likely delaying that project beyond the completion dates for the other schools’ secured vestibules.

“I don’t want to go to bed at night and say, “I voted not to approve that one school’ and then something happens at that school.”

Seriously?

If Sotos envisions not being able to go to bed with one school out of seven not having a not-really-secured vestibule, how the heck is he sleeping even a wink RIGHT NOW – knowing that NONE of those schools currently has a truly secured vestibule?

The answer: He’s sleeping just fine, thank you, because this whole secured-vestibule brouhaha is nothing more than a charade.

For months now Sotos and the Board have been grandly wringing their hands with Kabuki-style consternation and woe, while telling anyone who will listen about how terribly vulnerable the District’s students are under the schools current security systems. Hence the unequivocal, non-negotiable, absolute “need” to spend almost $7 million on not-really-secured vestibules that won’t keep a student, parent, visitor or disgruntled employee from bringing in lethal weaponry.

That’s almost SEVEN MILLION DOLLARS for continuing non-security. And, based on the H-A article, only Board member Mark Eggemann had enough sense to propose holding off on the not-really-secured vestibules in order to “get the community more involved and get their feedback on whether they want to spend $6.9 million” on not-really-secured vestibules.

Hey, folks! There’s still plenty of time left to put a $6.9 million not-really-secured vestibules referendum question on the November ballot.

Meanwhile, however, Sotos and those same Board members and administrators seem fine and dandy with leaving the kids completely at the mercy of every fanatic and whack-job imaginable for however many more months it will take until the not-really-secured vestibules are constructed. According to the H-A story, the Board couldn’t reach a consensus on “temporary security” at the schools, whatever form that might take.

But $7 million for not-really-secured vestibules is more of a “Look, there goes Elvis!” distraction from the more problematic stagnation, if not decline, in the objectively measurable performance of the District’s students. And it also allows FGM architects and other construction-related vendors to pocket a lot more of the taxpayers’ money on brick and mortar, their forte.

The simple truth is that the threat of such catastrophic violence is no more measurably real today than it was six months ago, or six years ago; or that it will be six months or six years from now. That’s just panic peddling and fear-mongering by a variety of folks who either are shilling for one special interest or another, or who inexplicably believe their own nonsense.

If the threat were real and significant, any responsible Board members and administrators would have insisted on the posting of armed security guards at the entrance to EVERY D-64 school, where they would remain until the not-really-secured vestibules were completed.

That there aren’t proves three very important points about this D-64 Board and administration:

They are stupid. They are dishonest. And they are irresponsible.

To read or post comments, click on title.

It’s been awhile – December 2015 – since we last looked at that bastion of non-transparency and un-accountability: the School Board and Administration of Park Ridge-Niles School District 64.

But one of our “stringers” tipped us to the latest anti-transparency move by the D-64 leadership team of Board president Anthony Borrelli and Supt. Laurie Heinz, both of whom seem to revel in the District’s opacity even as they proclaim it crystal clear – and credit themselves as the Keepers of the Windex.

That move? The creation of two new D-64 Board committees: a “Finance Committee” and a “Building & Sites Committee.”

Both of these new committees appear to be the brain-children of Luann Kolstad, who must have been given the title of “Chief School Business Official” when she was hired to replace Rebecca Allard, whose $200,000+ salary was paid while she held the more mundane “Business Manager” title.

The creation of two new Board committees normally wouldn’t be noteworthy if not for Kolstad’s –and the Board’s – expressed intention that they operate in a decidedly non-transparent and non-accountable manner.

Need proof? Check out Kolstad’s 02.08.16 memo.

You’ll see that the purpose of these new committees is ostensibly “[t]o facilitate more streamlined Board meetings.” Translation: shorter meetings with even more pre-chewed and pre-determined decisions than usual, rendering the mandatory “public” discussion and vote more of a charade to fool the rubes.

And if you listen to Kolstad’s explanation of this concept on the 02.08.16 meeting video (from 1:08:30 to 1:45:30) you’ll hear her claim that she doesn’t want to burden all seven Board members with reviewing the District’s annual $70 million-plus budget “line by line” but, instead, would prefer committees of only two Board members so that she could “kind of walk them through it” – presumably in that stereotypical “Move along, folks, there’s nothing to see here” kind of way.

But the darkest side of Kolstad’s proposal is the reason why she wants to limit each of these committees to only two Board members: so that each of those committee’s meetings will “not [be] subject to the Open Meetings Act so we do not need to post notification of the meetings ahead of time.”

Nor, presumably, will they need to keep “public” meeting minutes and make video recordings of those meetings.

Whether Kolstad’s actions reflect outright contempt for the taxpayers’ rights to see and hear what the District is doing with all their money, or whether she is just tone-deaf to those rights, is unclear. But the fact that she brazenly put this stuff in a memo suggests that she cares not one whit about transparency and the accountability it produces.

So how did our seven elected School Board representatives react to such blatant anti-transparency and anti-accountability? Pretty much like a tiny herd of clueless sheep. And with pretty much the level of comprehension Kolstad appears to be seeking in the folks who will populate her new committees: “individuals with little experience in either [finance or facilities] are ideal candidates” – presumably because they are so much easier for Kolstad and her accomplices to bamboozle.

Paging Vickie Lee…paging Vickie Lee. Ms. Lee, please report to the Finance Committee sign-in desk for your credentials and goodie bag.

Sadly, the most intelligent questions raised about these two new committees – actually the only intelligent questions raised about these committees – came not from any Board member but from resident Joan Sandrik, starting at the 1:38:25 mark of the video.

Sandrik rightly questioned how Kolstad could claim these two-Board member committees aren’t covered by IOMA when an Illinois Attorney General opinion from 1982 clearly states that IOMA covers meetings not only of school boards but also of “any subsidiary bodies…including but not limited to committees and subcommittees” of those boards. In fact, the last page of that A.G.’s opinion expressly addresses the status of a two member committee of a seven-member board:

[T]he creation of two member committees by a seven member public body does not operate to circumvent the provisions of the Open Meetings Act since the Act applies separately to the committees.

Although A.G. opinions are not binding on Illinois courts, the Illinois Supreme Court has long held that “a well-reasoned opinion of the Attorney General is entitled to considerable weight in resolving a question of first impression in this State regarding the construction of an Illinois statute” like IOMA. City of Springfield v. Allphin, 74 Ill.2d 117 (1979).

And we’re pretty darn sure a court would give that A.G. opinion a whole lot more weight than it would give the totally-wrong-but-never-in-doubt opinion of Borrelli: “Two Board members together does not constitute a majority of a quorum…it’s quite clear that you have to have a majority of persons, a majority of a quorum of the Board…a majority of a majority” (video,, 1:39:06 to 1:39:30), an opinion on which Kolstad and Heinz happily sang back-up

To Sandrik’s credit, she wasn’t deterred by the dismissiveness of Borrelli, Kolstad and Heinz.

“I also don’t know why something as important as finance, why you wouldn’t do a committee of the whole…isn’t that important to every one of you to know where the dollars are being spent? Why would you limit the specifics to two [Board members]?”

Exactly.

IOMA exists to ensure transparency and accountability from public officials who prefer to hide their activities from the taxpayers, especially the boards and administrations of our two school districts who, combined, spend approximately 70% of all our property taxes. Public bodies like the D-64 Board should be embracing IOMA, not trying to run away from it or find ways around it. But transparency and accountability have never been D-64’s strong suit, despite Borrelli’s repeated insistence to the contrary.

Example: Has anybody seen the minutes of all those closed-session meetings Borrelli presided over last spring and summer, or those “outstanding” performance evaluations that purportedly justified a one-year extension of his BFF Heinz’s contract and a raise? Anybody? Bueller?

If this Borrelli-led D-64 Board truly believed in transparency and accountability, they would have told Kolstad – immediately, definitively and unanimously – “No!” as soon as she suggested that this misbegotten committee structure was intended to avoid IOMA compliance and public oversight.

But this Board doesn’t believe.

So, instead, Borrelli pontificates either cluelessly or dishonestly about IOMA’s requirements, backed up by an equally clueless or dishonest Kolstad and Heinz. And the rest of the Board provides blank looks and slack jaws.

Thankfully, some comic relief was provided by Tom Sotos, twisting like Gumby to get himself to where he can praise the new committee structure in as earnest a voice as he can muster: “In reality it’s a little more transparency.”

Sure it is, Tom.

And the Easter Bunny will be visiting you soon.

To read or post comments, click on title.

It’s that time of the year again, folks, and we don’t mean Christmas. Or Hanukkah. Or Kwanzaa, Saturnalia, or Festivus, either.

We mean Cook County property tax time. Or, more specifically, the second installment of the 2014 property taxes. And judging by a post on the Park Ridge Concerned Homeowners Group Facebook page, that’s got a lot of you griping up a storm about the continually-rising costs of living in the City of Park Ridge.

We suggest you read the Concerned Homeowners’ string started by Phil Poole on December 18 to get yourself up to speed on the comments that we’ll be riffing on in this post. Otherwise, you may find yourself scratching your head out of confusion rather than from befuddlement at some of those comments that pass for insights and fiscal thinking.

What we find most interesting about those comments is that their primary focus seems to be on the City of Park Ridge’s property tax increase – even though the City spends pretty much the same amount of money serving, protecting and maintaining a community of 37,000+ people that Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 spends on educating a mere 4,500 kids.

Education is important, to be sure. But how exactly does one justify spending $70 million a year to educate 4,500 kids (an average of $15,555 per kid) at the same time we’re spending $70 million to provide 37,000+ residents (at an average of $1,892 per resident, including most of those same 4,500 kids) with essential City services (police, fire, sewer, water, streets, sidewalks), a Library, and those huge-ticket capital improvements such as flood remediation?

For residents with kids in our public schools, the justification for more and more indiscriminate school spending is pretty much just plain math.

Even if the size of your home and land puts you among Park Ridge’s Top 25% residential property taxpayers and your annual property tax bill is $21,000, only around $2,100 of that goes to the City – while approximately $7,000 goes to D-64 and another $7,000 goes to D-207. So if you’ve got just one kid in D-64 schools, you’re getting over $14,000 of education for your $7,000. In investment vernacular, that’s a 100% ROI. Annually.

Add a second kid to D-64 and that gives you $28,000 of education for your $7,000, raising your ROI to a whopping 300%. Also annually. What’s not to like about that, especially if one of your principal life’s goals is to suck more money out of the system than you pay in?

Do you think that might explain the dead silence about D-64 (and D-207) taxes and tax increases from many of those commentators on the Concerned Homeowners page – you know, those with kids in D-64 (and D-207) schools – who happily barbecue the City for its taxing/spending increases while at the same time spouting mindless socialist rimshots like: “[A] city should act like a big family” and “People will not work harder because they get payed more.”

Seriously?

Which brings us, albeit indirectly, to the recent decision by the City Council to appeal a Cook County Circuit Court decision over-ruling the Park Ridge Planning & Zoning Commission’s withholding approval necessary for a developer to construct a four-story, 22-unit residential building at 400 Talcott, even though the development met the requirements of the City’s Zoning Code.

We’re no fans of increased residential density for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is the likelihood such increased density brings more flooding and more school-aged kids adding to our school-tax deficits. But when a developer satisfies our Zoning Code requirements, that should be the end of it – especially when both the City’s former and current law firms agree that the likelihood of the City’s prevailing on appeal is low.

If you want a place to lay the blame for this fiasco, it should be the Zoning Code. And if that’s not enough for you, blame the 17 residents who comprised the Ad Hoc Zoning Ordinance Rewrite Committee that, with the assistance of an outside consultant, produced the current Zoning Ordinance 10 years ago. But don’t blame the developer just because you think he’s a jerk, or a bully, or because you dislike his project.

And whatever you do, don’t say and do things which stupidly suggest that the City is now just trying to make life miserable and unduly expensive for the developer in the hope that he’ll give up and go away. That’s bad in principle, it’s bad policy, and it’s exactly the kind of thing that causes naysayers to brand Park Ridge as “unfriendly to business.”

With that kind of reputation, how can Park Ridge expect to get any of those businesses that some of our more clueless residents claim are just waiting for the City’s elevator pitch – like a centrally-located Jimmy Johns?

To read or post comments, click on title.