If you give a rat’s derriere about the quality of the public education that consumes close to 70% of our property tax dollars, take a few minutes to read Jennifer Johnson’s recent articles in the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate about the reactions of Park Ridge-Niles School District 64’s and Maine Township High School District 207’s superintendents to their schools’ performance on the first round of the Partnership for Assessment of Reading for College and Careers (“PARCC”) testing.

You can find them at: “District 64 school chief says PARCC results a ‘snapshot in time’ “ (Dec. 15, 2015) and “District 207 superintendent: Test results create ‘false narrative’ of student performance” (Dec. 14, 2015).

D-64 superintendent Laurie Heinz attempts to defend what sounds like her district’s unimpressive performance with the following italicized quotes from the first article:

“From a formatting perspective, [the PARCC test] went well. We had no technical issues.”

In other words, D-64 didn’t screw up the administration of the test. Huzzah!

“I have not looked at how our results are compared to other schools.”

The very first thing Ms. Heinz should be doing is comparing D-64’s results to other districts – because whatever D-64 schools add to our property values is relative to how they match up with other demographically-comparable districts. Perhaps Heinz might be more motivated to prioritize that kind of comparative analysis if our School Board told her that the continuation of her employment and $250,000+ salary depends upon how D-64 rates against other comparable districts? Oh, wait…never mind: that feckless Board would never impose a performance standard on her after.

“My letter to parents explained the belief we have that this [PARCC test] is a snapshot in time….”

EVERY test – including a math final, the SAT, the ACT, etc. – is “a snapshot in time.” So her point is?

“We surpassed the state of Illinois average in both language arts and math.”

Seriously? As best as we can tell, D-64 is in the top 10-15% in per-pupil expenditures among ALL Illinois elementary school districts, yet Heinz is bragging about merely “surpassing the state of Illinois average.” Seriously?

“We had over 50 percent of our students within those two [“thorough understanding” and “exceeds”] levels in reading and…math.”

Merely “over 50 percent”?  See previous comment, but add one more “seriously?”

Interestingly enough, D-207 superintendent Ken Wallace echoed some of Heinz’s themes – which causes us to wonder if they were generic sound-bites and “talking points” from some special PARCC public relations template ginned up by the propaganda department of the Illinois Association of School Administrators that self-congratulatory fluff-and-stroke/networking organization for superintendents and

But Wallace takes it up a notch by ripping on the tests themselves and with statements like:

“Right now, the results [of the PARCC test] are next to meaningless to us” because he doesn’t think “they truly and accurately reflect the success of [D-207] students.”

Not surprisingly Wallace, like Heinz, avoids matching up D-207’s PARCC results with those of other demographically-comparable districts. Why make such comparisons when you can blow smoke up your own kilt and befuddle the taxpayers by insisting that D-207 is doing great – just ask ‘em!

“Any one test is not going to be a better predictor of student success in college than achievement across a rigorous set of courses.”

That very well may be true. But tell that to the admissions department of your kid’s dream college when he/she pulls a 1500 on the SAT, or a 17 on the ACT.  Or see how many advanced placement credits can be earned  with “1”s on those AP exams.

And when asked what plans D-207 has for next year’s testing, Wallace sounded totally dismissive of the test and/or of what level of achievement is expected:

“We will meet the minimum guidelines, testing in algebra and language arts.”

Yes, by all means let’s be satisfied with “the minimum” because that’s been working so well for the District over the last decade as its ranking has steadily declined even as its cost per pupil to our taxpayers has steadily increased.

Once again, we see that both of our school districts keep whistling past the graveyards of standardized test-based achievement and of comparing that achievement to other demographically-similar districts with which Park Ridge competes for new residents.

And while it seeems almost unfathomable that a school board could be any less demanding of student achievement and of teacher/administrator accountability than the D-64 Board, the D-207 Board may have met and exceeded that level of irresponsibility and general cluelessness.  At the very least they are 1 and 1A.

Which brings to mind, again, Mark Twain’s famous quote:

“In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.”

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Last week’s edition of the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate published a story (“Out-of-district family ordered to pay $12,731 to District 64,” Dec. 3) about the Board of Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 voting, at its November 30, 2015 special meeting, to charge a family $12,731 because it enrolled two children in D-64 schools despite the fact that the children lived in Des Plaines.

That violates the District’s policy that only children physically residing in the District may attend District schools.

The $12,731 represents a $78.59 per diem for each child’s days of attendance.

The H-A story, however, does not explain how exactly the District will go about actually collecting that money, or what the costs of collection might be if the scofflaws refuse to pay. It did report, however, that the District paid $5,522.50 for a private investigator to gather evidence of the non-residency; and $900 for a hearing officer conduct the hearing at which the violation was found.

So if the offenders make the payment with no further cost to the District, the net recovery to the District’s taxpayers will be $6,308.50 – or roughly half what the offenders unlawfully sucked out of the District. That’s better than a sharp stick in the eye, although somebody at D-64 should be looking into how these parasites also can be charged for those investigation and hearing costs.

In case you’re not familiar with the shorthand terminology of this blog, “parasites” are non-resident, non-taxpayers who intentionally feed off those goods and/or services paid for by our resident taxpayers.

Parasites are to be distinguished from “freeloaders,” which is our shorthand term for resident taxpayers who make sure they get far more in tax-funded benefits than they actually pay in taxes.

Supt. Laurie Heinz indicated that this is the first family to be charged for unlawful attendance since the District implemented its new residency re-verification process at the beginning of this 2015-16 school year, although we thought that dubious distinction fell to the kids of the D-64 teacher living in Chicago who nevertheless claimed to be residing in the District.

Heinz also said that several other investigations are ongoing. Hopefully the District will dilligently pursue them and they will yield similar or even better returns.

Not surprisingly, however, the H-A article reports that the Tony Borrelli-led School Board (like the John Heyde-led board before it) conducted all its discussions of this matter in its typical Star Chamber closed-sessions – before staging its required open-session public vote. Also not surprisingly, the parasites were not identified.

Why not? The H-A article doesn’t say. And, frankly, we can’t think of any good reason.

Folks merely charged – not convicted, just charged – with DUI, or marijuana possession, or the theft of a $200 cell phone, are likely to get their names and a brief account of the charges against them published in the H-A and/or the Park Ridge Journal, albeit with the disclaimer that: “An arrest does not constitute a finding of guilt.”

So why the special treatment for adults who were administratively adjudicated, after an evidentiary hearing, of ripping off D-64 taxpayers for almost $13,000 worth of education for their kids – and who likely would have continued ripping us off for tens of thousands of dollars more had they not been caught?  What privacy rights, or privacy expectations, do the parasitic parents/guardians have, especially after they’ve been found guilty?

The D-64 Board and Adminstration isn’t saying.

That’s the problem with the secrecy of the Star Chamber proceedings regularly run by Borrelli and rubber-stamped by most of the Board.

But as you can see and hear from the video of that special Board meeting – most of which was conducted in…wait for it…closed session – there may be a faint breeze of transparency in the air.

Starting at the 4:55 mark (of what is only a 12-minute video), Borrelli seems to off-load responsibility for closed sessions onto the D-64 Administration and/or its attorneys by suggesting he’s in the dark about what topics and information actually excuse all those closed sessions he’s been calling.  Nevertheless, he goes on to describe a new procedure by which the Board can evaluate in advance of the closed-session votes the appropriateness of proposed closed sessions.

That sounds like an improvement over the current procedure that has Borrelli quoting the numerical designations for various exceptions to open meetings under the Illinois Open Meetings Act (“IOMA”) right before taking the closed-session votes – even if it doesn’t sound like the memos he’ll be sharing with fellow Board members will show up in the meeting Board packets available to the public.

Moving from darkness to light tends to be a slow process, especially for those who prefer the dark.

We’d like to think that our consistently calling out Borrelli for his Heyde-like secretive ways contributed to this new initiative.  But since Borrelli is unlikely to ever admit something like that, we won’t make that claim.  But we’re pretty sure that Board member Mark Eggemann’s votes against many/most closed sessions (sometimes/often joined by Board member Tom Sotos) was a factor.

Irrespective of what may have motivated it, however, it’s still a step in the right direction, albeit a baby step.

Now let’s see how long it takes for Borrelli and the Board to show us they can walk

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No less a genius than Benjamin Franklin once opined that: “He who chooses security over freedom deserves neither.”

And no less a wartime leader than Franklin Delano Roosevelt noted that: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

But both of those sentiments were MIA last Monday (11.16.15) night at the Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 Board meeting, and apparently at the last several Board meetings, as the D-64 “Chicken Littles” – a/k/a, the D-64 Board and administration members – tried to convince whomever would listen that each of the District’s seven schools and everyone inside them are in imminent danger from (pick your favorite paranoia): ISIS suicide bombers, unstable non-custodial parents, bullied introverts with access to semi-automatic weapons, or miscellaneous unidentified bogeymen.

Instead, we got repeated displays of what no less a political philosopher than Edmund Burke warned about: “No passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”

And, yes, the fearmongers did invoke “Sandy Hook.” More than once.

But, better yet, they also invoked the image of Laurie Dann – the emotionally-troubled young woman who, in 1988, walked into the Hubbard Woods Elementary School in Winnetka with three pistols tucked into her clothing and proceeded to shoot one child to death and wound five others.

But the D-64 tag team of Board president Tony Borrelli and Supt. Laurie Heinz – seemingly operating from Rahm Emanuel’s playbook – don’t appear to want to let any crisis, real or imagined, go to waste.  So they are doing their best to stampede the herd (a/k/a the rest of the D-64 Board) into throwing multi-millions of taxpayer dollars at “security” projects that won’t really make our schools secure, including the “secured vestibules” that have now come down in price to a bargain-basement $5.1 million.

Why spend $5.1 million when, as we understand it, each school is currently supposed to be on lockdown during the school day, with the only entry point being a locked main entrance through which only approved visitors can be “buzzed in.”

What’s “insecure” about that?

We’re still not sure, even after watching the “secured vestibules” portion – from 57:15 to 3:24:35 – of the meeting video. But from the gist of the comments made by the Chicken Littles, the schools aren’t the fortresses some folks might like them to be.

But here’s a most curious fact: despite D-64’s teachers being, along with the children, the most direct beneficiaries of whatever “security” the $5.1 million secured vestibules can provide, their union – a/k/a the Park Ridge Education Association (“PREA”) – has failed/refused to formally endorse them.

Without explanation.

You can watch (at 2:11:00 – 2:11:47 of the meeting video) the current president of the PREA, Erin Breen, say that the PREA has no official position on the plan. And several minutes later you can watch the most recent PREA past president (and current Lincoln Middle School teacher) Andy Duerkop state that schools can’t be made “safe” before questioning whether secured vestibules are the best way to spend $5 million.

Gee, do you think the PREA’s refusal to go on record in support of $5 million worth of half-baked secured vestibules has anything to do with the fact that it’s going to be asking taxpayers for a new multi-year, multi-million dollar contract next year?

If so, you may be starting to understand how local government works.

But if the teachers give so little concern to the secured vestibules that they aren’t willing to jeopardize their next contract by formally supporting them, why did a 4 (Borrelli, Zimmerman, Lee and Johnson) to 3 (Paterno, Eggemann and Sotos) majority vote to spend $600,000 to move forward on their design and whatever building additions/renovations may be needed to accommodate them?

Could it be because the D-64 Board and Administration has been so unsuccessful in moving the needle of objectively-measurable student performance that they need a “Look, there goes Elvis!” distraction?

If so, what could be a better distraction than panic-peddling various forms of domestic terrorism (Sandy Hook, Laurie Dann, etc.), especially when you’ve got parents like Jeff Schneider telling the Board to “Do anything in your power, regardless of cost, to protect these schools and our children”; and Paul Sheehan asking the Board to adopt a policy of “Zero tolerance for risk to our babies while within our schools”?

There were a few voices of reason, however, including residents Joan Sandrik and Diane Bresler; and Board member Dathan Paterno, who raised enough questions about the process, the data, the “expert” opinions, and the manipulativeness of the secured vestibule advocates to stop any such project dead in its tracks if making the right long-term, cost-effective decision was the principal goal.

But it’s not.  And it rarely has been at D-64.

Ironically, the kind of spare-no-expense/accept-no-risk nuttiness voiced by Board members, administrators, the District’s architects, and some of those citizen speakers ignores the fact that the $5 million spent on secured vestibules is basically WASTED if not accompanied by metal detectors.

Without metal detectors at every secured vestibule, any bullied student can walk into the school with a backpack loaded with the same three handguns that Laurie Dann carried into that Winnetka school.

Any over-stressed, homicidal non-custodial dad can walk in with the same Bushmaster XM15-E2S stashed under his trench coat, and the same Glock 20SF stuck in his waistband, that Adam Lanza carried into Sandy Hook Elementary.

And any disaffected soccer mom with too many toys in her attic can stroll right in wearing a suicide vest under her North Face parka filled with ten or twenty pounds of ball bearings, like Hasna Ait Boulahcen may (or may not) have been wearing when she was killed in that Saint-Denis apartment.

But none of the Chicken Littles want to discuss making metal detectors part of the secured vestibule project. Metal detectors are serious business, a lot more serious than this Board and this Administration is willing to get about “security.”

Look! There goes Elvis!

Again.

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We haven’t had all that many good things to say about Dathan Paterno since he was elected to the School Board of Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 in April 2013 – with our endorsement in which, among other things, we praised his view of referendums “not as last resorts in times of crisis but as proactive educational tools that ‘would afford voters/taxpayers a greater awareness of the financial woes of the district and the policies that contributed to those woes.'”

Unfortunately, he has been a dependable vote for the secretive closed session meetings that have become routine under current Board president Tony Borrelli and his overpaid BFF superintendent.

And for each vote Paterno casts for the District’s taxpayers (e.g., his vote against giving Supt. Laurie Heinz an estimated $20K raise after just one year of unspectacular performance), he seems to cast at least two boneheaded spendthrift ones (e.g., his vote to give Heinz a one-year contract extension worth $250K after that same one year of unspectacular performance; and $500K to provide middle-schoolers with “free” Chromebooks).

Meanwhile, objectively-measurable educational performance at D-64 remains stagnant while costs continue to rise, and Paterno and his colleagues remain silent as church mice.

So despite D-64’s spending around $14,000 per pupil, per year, one of our community’s major growth industries has become tutoring – to compensate for the lack of learning actually taking place in those big-spending schools.

But Paterno appears to have found an acorn with his criticism of the District’s plan to spend $6 million to secure the vestibules of its school buildings, as expressed in his Letter to the Editor in last week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“$6 million doors just a placebo for District 64,” Nov. 3).

As Paterno correctly points out, events like Sandy Hook are extreme rarities which become hyper-exaggerated primarily by a news media whose credo for too long has been: “If it bleeds, it leads” – and by all those “helicopter parents” who want no expense spared on their children, especially if that expense is paid for primarily with Other People’s Money (“OPM”); i.e., the taxpayers’ money.

Notably, Paterno’s opposition to spending $6 million to secure the schools’ vestibules does not seem to reflect an overall concern with D-64 spending $6 million. Given his record on the Board over the past two years, that means he’s already got one or more other places he’d rather spend it.

But improving education and the students’ performance metrics doesn’t appear to be one of them.

Not surprisingly, we couldn’t glean very much from the last couple of months of sketchy School Board meeting minutes and corresponding “Reports,” but we are hearing that the “vestibule” projects are actually school building additions that will contain and/or accommodate those secured vestibules – and which comprise a substantial portion of those “vestibule” costs.

In other words, it’s not just about “security” – something we would have expected Paterno to have mentioned in his letter if his goal was to play it totally straight with the taxpayers.

Speaking of playing it totally straight with the taxpayers, it looks and sounds like D-64’s Secrecy Patrol has done its typically excellent-but-deplorable job of keeping the taxpayers clueless not only about the building additions aspect of the “vestibule” work but, also, about the Board’s consideration – per “Appendix 3” of it’s November 5, 2015 meeting “Report” – of doing the $15-20 million of 2016 building work without referendum – by pulling $10 million out of the District’s semi-sacrosanct fund balance “and issuing in spring 2016 a small non-referendum bond issue of $5M-$10M.”

In other words, the Borrelli-led D-64 Board is seriously considering a plan that makes sure we taxpayers don’t even get a referendum vote on this first wave of $15-20 Million of spending – before they start dumping the next $12 Million, or $26 Million, of additional planned “health, life, safety” expenditures on us.

And because of his silence about this scheme, we have to question whether Paterno is merely asleep at the wheel or actually a co-conspirator in that scheme.

But asleep or co-conspiring, he nevertheless seems to have gotten it right with his observation that “secure vestibules would not appreciably reduce the risk of violence to our children and staff” because: (a) there appear to be no reports of attacks on American schools that were foiled by secure vestibules, and (b) an assailant bent on harming schoolchildren can find much easier targets on the playgrounds during recess, or walking out the doors at day’s end.

This community’s history demonstrates that school children are more at risk from crossing streets – either on foot or on bicycle – than from armed assailants. This new obsession with secured vestibules, however, reminds us of the anti-O’Hare Chicken Littles who’ve been warning of an imminent plane crash into Maine South for the past couple of decades, if not longer.

Not surprisingly, the District’s architect of record, FGM Architects, is 100% behind pushing forward with all this new construction. According to a Park Ridge Herald-Advocate story from October 13, 2015 (“Roofs, windows, doors targeted for repairs and upgrades in District 64”), just a preliminary study of these projects will put over $300K in FGM’s pocket. And then there is likely to be a percentage of the total cost of the projects FGM will grab for coordinating and/or overseeing them.

That’s because FGM gets paid for bricks and mortar, not for any improvements to the quality of education within the walls those bricks and mortar comprise.

So we’re grateful for Paterno’s having called attention to the likelihood that spending a whopping $6 million on “secured vestibules” – with or without the building additions he failed to mention – is far from the highest and best use of that money. Whether his silence about the Board’s looting of its own fund balance and its non-referendum borrowing calls into question the motive(s) and validity of his criticism, however, remains to be seen.

But for somebody who has pretty much been lost in the Borrelli’s/Heinz closed-session funhouse for the last two years, getting anything right deserves at least a qualified kudo.

Now, if only he can stay awake and attentive for the remaining two years of his term.

UPDATE (11.13.15)  This week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate is reporting (“District 64 board divided on $6 million secure doors,” Nov. 10) that Paterno was taken to task by at least a couple of his fellow Board members at the Nov. 5 Board meeting. And, not surprisingly, secrecy-uber-alles Board president Tony Borrelli was one of them.

“ ‘When these things are crafted, you have to be very careful,’ said Borrelli. ‘Any time after tonight would have been perfect.’ ”

Translation: When D-64 orchestrates a process to achieve a particular result, don’t screw up the orchestration! Or at least don’t screw it up until the fat lady’s done singing.

And Board member Bob Johnson didn’t seem to like the way Paterno took his case directly to the people rather than confining it to a Board meeting:

“I think that a much better forum for what had been written would be here,” Johnson is reported to have said.

Translation: If you only say it at a Board meeting, D-64’s propaganda minister, Bernadette Tramm, can have a chance to spin it, and maybe even keep it out of the newspaper so the public isn’t the wiser.

But we need to note that Board member Tom Sotos, himself not all that impressive since his election last April, appears to have stood up for Paterno and the transparency his comments added to the issue:

“I think actually [Paterno] stepped in the right direction….”

Exactly.

Now let’s see if Paterno can do that on other topics – and if Sotos starts stepping in the right direction himself.

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Back on August 11 we published a post about the lack of transparency at…where else…Park Ridge-Niles School District 64.

Unofficial motto: “Don’t ask, cuz we won’t tell.”

We wrote about how D-64 Super!-intendent – because that’s pretty much how Board president Tony Borrelli and fellow Board members gushed about her when the Board gave her a $250,000+ contract extension and raise a few months ago – Laurie Heinz got herself a propaganda army she named the “Community Relations Council”(the “CRC”) for its avowed purpose of “strengthening relationships between the schools and local residents” in order to facilitate “a free-flowing dialogue and make sure everyone’s voice is heard.”

D-64 Minister of Disinformation Bernadette Tramm must have earned combat pay for that folderol.

Anybody who pays attention to what passes for representative government at D-64 knows by now that if there’s any “free-flowing dialogue” over there, it’s occurring only when the Board scurries off into its regular secretive closed session meetings, the proceedings of which it hides and keeps hidden from the public. For us ordinary Park Ridge residents/taxpayers, on the other hand, “free-flowing dialogue” most often consists of “talking to the hand” of Heinz and the Board collective.

According to Super!-Heinz, there were almost 40 applicants for the CRC, 19 of which were chosen and identified for the first time in a Sept. 16 posting on the D-64 website – one day after the CRC’s first meeting was held. Just chalk that timing up to D-64’s version of the “it’s-better-to-ask-for-forgiveness-than-permission” school of non-transparency and non-accountability.

And this being the D-64 Star Chamber, the only thing that has been revealed about the 19 successful applicants so far appears to be their names:

Marlene Arteta, Chris Bauer, Anne Camarano, Mariana Eguren-Cosma, Jeff Flyke, Kathleen Kornely, Terry Krahl, Dale Lasky, Robert Leurck, Maureen McGuire, Annette Miller, Sheri Roche, Philip Salemi, Rob Schoenstedt, Franco Scimeca, Paul Sheehan, Michael Shields, Jennifer Steurer and Kara Vormittag.

Because of D-64’s pro-secrecy/anti-transparency obsession, the qualifications of these 19 individuals (as well as the other 20 or so unsuccessful applicants) are nowhere to be found on the District’s website or in any of its Board materials for the past several Board meetings. That’s in stark and ugly contrast to the transparency of the process by which the Park Ridge City Council appoints residents to its boards and commissions – where every single application is posted on the City’s website days before those applicants are interviewed by the Mayor’s Advisory Council, in meetings open to the press and the public, prior to the recommendation of the selected applicants to the mayor and the full Council’s voting on them in meetings open to the press and the public.

We also can’t find anything in the D-64 Board’s minutes, agendas or meeting materials to suggest that the Board had any role whatsoever (even its typical rubber-stamping one) in the appointments of the favored 19. That suggests that the whole CRC is Heinz’s personal rodeo, although we assume Tramm was whispering sweet somethings into Heinz’s ear during the selection process.

Meanwhile, unsuccessful applicants like Watchdog reader/commentator George Korovilas were left scratching their heads about why they weren’t chosen, although only Korovilas publicly expressed his skepticism of the process and/or selection criteria in a comment to the 08.11.15 post on 09.15.15 @ 11:03 a.m.:

I think that maybe PUBDOG might be onto something with this NEW council created by the superintendent. I was offended that PUBDOG would suggest that only YES men would be put on this council, since I applied to be on it. I, along with others that believe there is good and bad with what the district is doing and had NO INTENTION of being YES people, have been denied a spot on this council. I hope that I am wrong but it looks like I might owe PUBDOG an apology for his original take on this Council.

Poor guy: he thought the selection process would be (to quote the late Jay McMullen, husband of then-Chicago mayor Jane Byrne) “on the legit.” As if anything of consequence D-64 does is ever totally “on the legit” or even totally out-in-the-open.

Korovalis clearly overlooked how his vocal beefing about the District’s ongoing refusal to provide D-64 parents with itemized billing statements of the expenses that comprise the annual student fees made him a persona non grata with Heinz and the Board. His chances of getting appointed to anything at D-64 more important than Franklin School copy machine volunteer are slim and none.

But back to the CRC.

It’s supposed to meet three times a year for a couple of hours at a crack, with these 19 members serving for two years.

And according to Heinz’s post on the D-64 website, CRC members “will be building their understanding of current District 64 issues” – as spoon-fed to them by Heinz and Tramm, of course – which those CRC members will, in turn, spoon-feed to the community.  That’s the way non-transparent, non-accountable governmental bodies stay that way: by controlling the flow of information to that public.

And Heinz also wants CRC members to “provide her with feedback about what misconceptions the community might have about what is or isn’t happening” in D-64. [Emphasis ours.]

“Misconceptions” like the continuing underachievement of D-64’s students despite the ever-increasing costs to the taxpayers?

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Today we’re going to play a game of “Let’s Pretend.”

Let’s pretend you’re a member of the board of directors of a $70 million service company that employs a few hundred people.

One day someone at the company discovers that a particular employee “engaged in dishonest and unprofessional conduct” during a one-year period that cost the company thousands of dollars. And upon this discovery being made, the company conducts an internal investigation that confirms the employee’s dishonesty and extent of the company’s loss.

And let’s pretend that, upon receiving the investigator’s report, the company’s CEO – whom you and your fellow board members consider such a superstar that, after only one year into her original 3-year contract, you unanimously extend her contract another year at its $250,000-plus salary – recommends the employee be fired.

Would you review the investigation report, accept your superstar CEO’s recommendation, and authorize the firing of that dishonest employee?

If you said “No!” then you’re qualified to be Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 Board member.

Because, as reported in an online Park Ridge Herald-Advocate story (“School officials mum on Park Ridge teacher’s $16,500 fine.” September 22, 2015), that $70 million “company” is D-64; the employee reportedly is D-64 middle-school teacher Kate De La Pasqua; and the superstar CEO is Supt. Laurie Heinz.

Since this was a D-64 Board decision, you don’t have to read the H-A story to know that every important discussion and decision related to it was held in closed session.

When it comes to hiding from the taxpayers, Board president Tony Borrelli’s transformation into predecessor John Heyde is almost complete: watch the opening minutes of a few Board meeting videos and you can almost feel Borrelli’s delight over running into closed session – which seems to have become a permanent feature of every Board meeting – so that he and his backbone-challenged fellow Board members [Mark Eggemann cast the only “no” vote on this closed session] can talk with the kind of candor they’re afraid to express in open session.

Or maybe they just don’t want a public record of their cluelessness and/or spinelessness.

According to the H-A article, the District cut a deal with De La Pasqua that includes a “remedial warning” and a $16,500 “fine.” And because the deal was cut in D-64’s Star Chamber, not only did the District fail to post even a redacted copy of the settlement agreement or any details of the settlement on the District’s website prior to the August 27th meeting when the deal was approved, but it made sure the settlement agreement contained a confidentiality clause.

The better to make sure that not only would no member of the press or public get any advance warning of this latest pre-cooked morsel of Board business-as-usual, but that they would have trouble learning about it even after the deal was done.

To its credit, however, the H-A issued a FOIA request and, in response, D-64’s minister of propaganda and disinformation, Bernadette Tramm, produced a highly-redacted copy of the agreement and notice of remedial warning that blacked out any information about the charges against De La Pasqua – other than that she “failed to adhere” to a D-64 employee ethics policy and some unspecified Board policy.

So if you pretend you’re a D-64 Board member who actually believes in honesty, integrity, transparency and accountability in D-64 governance, would you say: “Gee, Ms. Tramm, can’t you publish the redacted version of the settlement agreement on the City’s website so that no FOIA request is required?”

Apparently not.

And when the H-A asked for an un-redacted copy of the settlement, Tramm pled privacy concerns and cited the Illinois School Student Records Act, 105 ILCS 10, et seq.  So the H-A reportedly is taking its case to the Illinois Attorney General. And good for it.

Naturally, this kind of backroom deal-making has led to a lot of speculation and rumors, with the most interesting one being that De La Pasqua and her hubby may have scammed D-64 out of thousands of dollars in tuition by lying about the residency of some un-named (wink, wink) student(s).

Based on the 2-year old D-64 salary data we could find, De La Pasqua should be making over $100,000. And she is listed as the owner of a condo at 1301 W. Touhy Avenue that she purchased for $125,000 in 2014. But public records also show a “Katherine De La Pasqua” at 5024 Nagle Ave., Chicago.

Hmmm….

We also find it interesting that the settlement included a $16,500 “fine” which – SURPRISE!– D-64 apparently has not explained. Does that amount represent D-64’s total loss from whatever “dishonest and unprofessional conduct” De La Pasqua allegedly engaged in, or just a small fraction of it – with the remainder having been negotiated away by the Board and, consequently, eaten by the D-64 taxpayers?

And if she ripped off D-64’s taxpayers for that much, is she being charged interest for the one year (until June 2016) she and her hubby are getting to pay it back?

A few years ago we published a post about how D-64’s botching of small tasks – at that time, the school lunch supervision program – very well may portend the botching of much bigger tasks. This $16,500 backroom deal with De la Pasqua is another one of those small tasks.

Meanwhile, the same Board members who just a few months ago unanimously proclaimed Heinz a superstar, and extended her contract like one, have signaled that on a small matter such as this they might not really trust her judgment.

With teacher union contract negotiations on the horizon, that does not bode well for D-64 taxpayers who can count on nothing more than being kept in the dark by this decidedly non-transparent Board.

UPDATED 09.27.15.  On of our readers in the real estate business has advised us that Ms. De La Pasqua sold the Nagle property in 2010 and purchased 6234 N. Olcott (Norwood Park, Chicago) that same year.

To read or post comments, click on title.

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

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

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

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

Premeditated? Check.

Institutionalized? Check.

Designed to obscure and distract? Check.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To read or post comments, click on title.

The pop quiz today has only one question: Name the two units of local government that, in the past two months, have rewarded their No. 1 bureaucrat for what appears to be average performance, at best?

If you answered “Park Ridge-Niles School Dist. 64 and Maine Twp. High School Dist. 207,” you’re a winner – even if, as a taxpayer, you might actually be more of a loser.

As we wrote about in several posts culminating in those of 07.01.15 and 07.06.15, the D-64 Board fell all over itself in unanimously voting to give rookie CEO/superintendent Laurie Heinz a one-year extension to her original three-year contract. That ensured that Heinz will be able to draw an additional $250,000+ from D-64 taxpayers despite not one shred of documentary evidence (or, at least, none that the D-64 Board chose to share with the taxpayers) of any significant improvement in D-64’s chronically lackluster student performance, as measured by objective statewide testing rather than D-64’s self-congratulatory navel gazing.

Three of the seven Board members (Mark Eggemann, Dathan Paterno and Tom Sotos) voted against giving Heinz an actual “raise” that we understand (because, of course, the details were not published) is worth between $10,000 and $20,000 – although, frankly, we don’t see the sense of giving away a $250,000+ contract extension but then denying a $10-20,000 raise.

Kind of like former Park Ridge alderman Don Bach’s (3rd) telling Bill Napleton back in January 2008 that the latter’s disrespect for Park Ridge ensured that Bach would never buy another $40,000 Cadillac from him – before voting to give Napleton up to $2.4 million of public dollars in environmental clean-up funding and sales-tax sharing revenues.

Not to be outdone by D-64’s drunken sailors, on July 16 the D-207 Board approved a one-year extension to the contract of superintendent Ken Wallace. This extension could push his pay up to $280,000 or more by the 2019-20 school year, once the built-in annual increases and available merit bonuses are included. And that also doesn’t count the additional thousands of dollars the District will pay to cover Wallace’s required pension contributions.

Besides paying premium prices for stagnant (or worse) performance, however, the other thing both school boards have in common is how they hid all the important discussions about Heinz’s and Wallace’s contract extensions and raises from the taxpayers through the BFF of every shameless and gutless politician: the closed session.

Frankly, there is no more effective and disrespectful way for our elected officials to trample transparency and accountability than by hiding in closed session – especially if all members of the governing body are co-conspirators who will make sure that, like Vegas, whatever happens in closed session stays in closed session. Although the Illinois Open Meetings Act does not require that closed session matters remain secret, not even one school board member has in the past two decades has displayed the integrity to publicly disclose closed-session proceedings the way then-ald. Dave Schmidt did by blowing the whistle on some kinky Council real estate maneuvering over the 720 Garden property back in 2008.

We’re still optimistic that D-64 newbie Eggemann, and maybe even newbie Sotos, might have their own “720 Garden Moment” over at D-64, hopefully sooner rather than later.

But we have no such hope for the Star Chamber that is the D-207 Board, where president Margaret McGrath leads a chorus of rubber-stampers – Sean Sullivan, Carla Owen, Paula Bessler, Mary Childers, Jin Lee and Teri Collins – in what has long been a pattern and practice of anti-transparency and un-accountability.

If you have any doubt about that, Exhibit A is the fact that while the City Council, the Park Board and the D-64 Board all post their meeting packets on-line prior to their meetings, the D-207 Board doesn’t.  Heck, the D-207 Board lacks the basic honesty, integrity, transparency and accountability to post its meeting packets on the District’s website even AFTER the meetings.

Instead, all D-207 provides its taxpayers is an agenda like the one for the 06.09.15 Board meeting, which advised that there would be a “CLOSED SESSSION” involving the “Appointment, Employment, Compensation, Performance Discipline or Dismissal of Employees.”

Such a vague explanation is a pretty effective way of discouraging taxpayers from showing up and asking any tough questions.

If you watch the very end of Part I of the meeting video, you’ll see and hear the Board adjourn to closed session one hour into the meeting, or about 8:30 p.m.; and if you watch the beginning of Part II of the meeting video, you’ll see and hear the Board return from the closed session about an hour later.

What went on during that “secret” hour is anybody’s guess. But one can safely assume it had something to do with the events beginning at the 3:57 mark of Part 2, when Sullivan moves to give Wallace $51,000 of additional merit compensation for meeting both his “target goals” (whatever they are/were) and his “stretch target goals (whatever they are/were). And at the 5:03 mark, McGrath reads a statement in which she declares that Wallace had met all his performance goals, and does so with an almost-regal self-assurance that suggests it is “beyond contestation”:

We would not have been surprised to hear her tell any doubters to “go put that in your pipe and smoke it.” But as the room full of empty chairs confirms, there were no doubters – pipe-smokers or non – to be found at that point in the proceedings.

Watching that video and contemplating those proceedings gave us a major case of déjà vu, as it called to mind our 10.22.13 post in which we remarked how the D-207 Board was giving Wallace a 5-year contract extension for…er…um…we aren’t quite sure what – even as Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville was getting only a 3-year extension after winning his second Stanley Cup.

Silly us, comparing the leadership of an unaccountable, un-competitive bureaucracy to the leadership of a what-have-you-done-lately, highly-competitive business enterprise where objectively measurable results actually matter; and compensation is merit-based.

That dichotomy at least partially explains why D-64 and D-207 taxes keep going up while the ranking of D-207’s “flagship” school, Maine South, has slid solidly into the 20s from a decade ago when it was in, or close to, Illinois’ Top 10 – and D-64 school rankings rarely even crack the Top 50.

That makes us wonder how any sane D-207 Board member can justify these regular contract extensions and raises for Wallace.

And it makes us wonder even more about the sanity of those D-64 Board members who are paying Heinz almost as much as Wallace is getting, even though she’s managing less than 4,400 students compared to Wallace’s 6,400; and she oversees a budget of less than $80 million while Wallace manages a $160 million budget.

Meanwhile, you Park Ridge taxpayers with no kids in either district but whose home is one of, if not the, largest asset you own can wonder about just how much longer that “Park Ridge has GREAT schools” sales pitch can lure in new residents (and what kind of new residents they might be) when, year after year, the various school rankings show our schools firmly behind those in Glenview, Northbrook, Evanston, Arlington Hts., Buffalo Grove, Libertyville, Vernon Hills, Mt. Prospect, Deerfield, Highland Park, Lincolnshire.

How soon will it become commonplace for current residents – like the mother commenting on John Bennett’s August 2 post on the Park Ridge Citizens Online FB page – to shamelessly proclaim how they will be packing up and moving out of Park Ridge just as soon as their kids suck the last ounce of “free”/subsidized education out of their fellow Park Ridge taxpayers:

“We still pay the highest fees than almost every other higher class suburbs around. And still never got a clear answer on where the money goes. Everything they supposedly told us are things the PTO supposedly pays for. And the PTO gets alot of money through those directories, every hot lunch and slice of pizza they make money off of. But at least they stopped charging for Lunch supervision! Its total BS! I cannot wait until my youngest finishes Maine South, we are outta here.”

For those of you at all uncertain about our definition of the term “freeloader,” you’ve just read the embodiment of it.

That’s the kind of attitude that, if it proliferates, will create a downward spiral for this community – aided and abetted by feckless, fiscally-irresponsible elected officials whose idea of “transparency” is conspiring in secret with the bureaucrats they’re already overpaying with OPM.

Ours.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Today we’re giving a Watchdog bark-out to the Board and Administration of Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 – and the Park Ridge City Council and Staff – for resolving their dispute over that economic black hole commonly known as the Uptown TIF.

As reported by the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“City: New agreement will lower Park Ridge TIF payments to schools,” June 23), it looks like the City and District 64 will be amending their existing intergovernmental revenue-sharing agreement that was entered into back when the Uptown TIF was created in 2003.

Interestingly enough, we believe that H-A article may be the very first time either local newspaper has referred in print to that Uptown boondoggle as being “the failed Uptown Tax Increment Financing District.” [Emphasis added.]

“Failed” is an apt description of was once touted as a once-in-a-lifetime “investment” of tens of millions of dollars of long-term bonded debt by the City’s “ready, fire, aim” cheerleaders back then: mayors Ron Wietecha and Mike Marous; a substantial bobblehead majority of the then-14 aldermen Council; Rasputin-like city manager Tim Schuenke; and all the “buy us more retail” folks populating the Chamber of Commerce.

Ironically, according to some of the financial projections circulated back then by Schuenke and the City’s hired-gun consultant, S.B. Friedman, 2015 was supposed to be the year that the TIF was to have started generating enough revenue to cover all of its debt service payments and actually produce a profit. Instead, the City is currently looking at a projected deficit/loss of over $15 million by the time the TIF expires in 2027.

The good news is that deficit/loss figure is down almost $8 million since the City’s current TIF consultants first calculated it, presumably because of some of the advanced bond refunding already done and taking into consideration the anticipated savings that the City is projecting from revising its revenue-sharing agreements with D-64, Maine Township High School District 207, and the Park Ridge Park District.

D-64 attorney (and former School Board member) Ares Dalianis noted a general consensus by the City and D-64 that “the language of the existing agreement is a little ambiguous” – in no small measure because that agreement contemplated that the Cook County Clerk would annually calculate the Equalized Assessed Value (“EAV”) for the new property growth in the TIF district, apparently without anyone at the City or D-64 actually confirming that fact with the Clerk’s office.

That’s because the mayors and the folks on the Council back then were so intent on getting the TIF passed and the project built that they were like cats in heat (or like folks with personal financial interests?). And the go-along-to-get-along D-64 Board members back then were more than happy to accept the City’s financial bribery and waive their well-founded objections to the TIF.

That apparently resulted in a slap-dash agreement with “ambiguous” terms that was negotiated in…you guessed it…closed sessions and rubber-stamped by both the Council and the School Board without the kind of public vetting that today’s City Council would be expected to require. 

Rubber-stamping is what used to pass for “due diligence” at City Hall. And that’s what still might pass for “due diligence” at D-64 – except that it’s almost impossible to tell for sure because that Board still conceals much/most of its deliberations about the important stuff in closed sessions and/or by not publishing relevant documents.

Unfortunately for all involved, however, the County “only measures new property [growth] at the end of a TIF district and there is not an accepted methodology on measuring new property during the life of the TIF,” according to Dalianis, and confirmed by City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton in slightly stronger terms back in 2013.

“The Cook County Clerk has never and will never, as a matter of fact and law, determine or recognize new property within the Uptown project area.”

Not surprisingly, none of the previous three city managers (Schuenke, Jim Hock and acting-CM Juliana Maller) seems to have made any effort to find that out. Instead, Maller came up with a bunch of mojo calculations of what the City owed to the other local taxing bodies, which now appear to have been flat-out wrong. But because Maller vouched for them and nobody questioned them, they became S.O.P. for the City and D-64 thereafter.

During her short tenure as the City’s finance director, Allison Stutts started looking into Maller’s calculations. But it was her successor, Kent Oliven, who in his even shorter tenure as finance director (relying on his prior experience with TIF and TIF accounting) suspected that those calculations were bogus. That led to the City’s hiring of Kane McKenna and KM’s confirmation of their bogusness.

That led to the dispute between the City and D-64 over the difference between what the City actually owed and what the City had paid based on Maller’s calculations of the incalculable, which payments continued even after she packed up for Hanover Park.

With such a ridiculous history as backdrop, therefore, it’s nothing short of a minor miracle that the current Council and Staff, and the current D-64 Board and Administration, were able to overcome their predecessors’ buffoonery and reach a resolution without resort to costly litigation that would have bled the taxpayers from both sides.

Well done, folks!

To read or post comments, click on title.

In our 07.01.15 post we wrote about the almost reflexive propensity of a majority of the current Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School Board members to run into closed sessions and hide from the taxpayers whenever they can get away with it, and especially when they are discussing how to spend more of the taxpayers’ money.

Today we’re addressing the charade by which that Board contrived a one-year contract extension and a raise for rookie superintendent Laurie Heinz.

As we did in our July 2 post, we refer you to the June 22 meeting videotape as the best evidence of how disingenuously clueless (or cluelessly disingenuous?) this Board can be. The Heinz discussion commences at the 4:01:04 mark with Board president Tony Borrelli – such a cheerleader for Heinz that we wonder where he was hiding his pom poms – announcing how he “wanted to read something” about Heinz’s performance.

That “something” turns out to be a five-minute gush about Heinz and her alleged accomplishments, all of which Borrelli claims were documented in two separate Board evaluations, one at mid-year and the other at year-end, neither of which were part of the June 22 Board meeting packet, or “Report.” Nor could we find them anywhere else on the District’s website.

According to Borrelli, there were a few wrinkles noted in Heinz’s mid-year evaluation that needed a little extra ironing. But by year-end “it was 4^th of July, the fireworks went off!”

Yes, that’s what he says on the video.

The absence of those evaluations from the meeting packets and D-64 website leads us to believe that neither Borrelli nor Heinz wanted to subject those evaluations to public scrutiny. That’s consistent with D-64’s institutionalized disrespect for the taxpayers who pay the bills for what appears to be a stagnant-to-declining operation, suggesting that whatever “fireworks” Heinz’s rookie-year performance might have set off were little more than a couple of bottle rockets and one stray Black Cat.

But that was more than enough to keep this Board “ooh”-ing and “ahh”-ing, as if watching a display of pyrotechnics engineered by the famed Grucci Family.

Borrelli insists that “[t]he entire attitude of the District has changed” thanks to Heinz, and that there has been “[s]ignificant improvement in the growth MAP scores” so that “[t]he needle, therefore, is moving” – a pointed response to a statement in our 06.22.15 post that “as best as we can tell, Heinz has failed to move the needle of student/District achievement or rankings even one click upward.”

Borrelli concludes with “[t]his District is lucky to have Dr. Heinz as our superintendent.”

We’d love to agree, really we would.  Because that would mean not only that the District’s students might be getting a better education but, also, that the District’s taxpayers might be getting more property value for the bigger and bigger property tax bucks the District keeps demanding, thanks to your unfriendly neighborhood School Board.

Unfortunately, this Borrelli-led Board is barely (if at all) any more transparent than the traditionally opaque boards of the past. Hence, not only are Heinz’s evaluations missing from the Board packets and District website, but so are those “rigorous” goals and standards that Board allegedly set for Heinz during this just-concluded school year. And we can’t seem to find the details of those reportedly rockin’ MAP scores, either.

From the sound of things, however, all those matters were discussed in the closed session at the May 11, 2015 meeting (Mark Eggemann and Tom Sotos voting against the closed session); and in the closed session at the May 18, 2015 meeting (Eggemann and Sotos voting “no”); and in the closed session at the June 1, 2015 meeting (Eggemann voting “no”); and in the closed session at the June 8, 2015 meeting (Eggemann and Sotos voting “no”). All the while, the taxpayers saw and heard nothing.

Nevertheless, at the 4:06:22 mark the rest of the Board members take over from Borrelli before voting unanimously to give Heinz a one-year contract extension worth more than $250,000. And beginning at the 4:09:12 mark (when Borrelli tries unsuccessfully to herd the Board into closed session), there’s more gushing until a 4-3 Board majority (Borrelli, Bob Johnson, Vickie Lee and Scott Zimmerman v. Eggemann, Dathan Paterno and Sotos) gives her an approximately $4,200 raise and some undisclosed but larger additional payment that will provide her with “full” health care coverage.

If you detect some schizophrenia there, join the club.

And as if the lily needed any further gilding, cheerleader Borrelli, still sans pom poms, attempts further justification of the Board’s group psychosis by noting that Heinz purportedly was hired at a “below market” rate, despite making as much in her rookie season as her vastly more experienced predecessor made in his final year; and that, even with the raise, she was still being paid “below market.”

Hey, you Board folks! If a “market” salary for Heinz is so important that Borrelli has to make special mention about it, why didn’t you leave Heinz with two years remaining on her contract and use some of that $250K-plus contract extension money to get her salary up to “market” – whatever that might be?

Oh, wait, we know that answer: that would have been the prudent thing to do!

This particular Kabuki would not be complete, however, without a few words from Heinz herself, who demonstrates her gratitude – at the 4:16:12 mark, between the extension vote and the raise vote – by insisting that, even though “the community” might expect significant improvements in student achievement and school rankings as a benchmark of her success, “[s]tudent achievement is one part of my job, it is not the sum total of a superintendent’s role.”

Yes, Ms. Heinz, student achievement is not the only measure of your success. But you darn well better realize that it’s Job One…by a mile.

Now, if only a majority of Board members could figure that out.

To read or post comments, click on title.