For those of you who actually give a rat’s derriere about who runs our local governmental bodies for the next four years – and how they do it – tonight is what passes for the unofficial kick-off of the 2015 election season in these parts.

It’s the Republican Women of Park Ridge’s 2015 Candidate Forum, and it will be held at the South Park Field House, Talcott at Cumberland, beginning at 7:00 p.m.

It is expected to feature appearances by Tony Bennett, Lady Gaga, Pharrell Williams, Beyonce, Sam Smith…wait a minute, no…that’s the list of the performers from the recent Grammy Awards broadcast. Sorry.

Instead, you’ll get to see and hear the candidates for:

• Park Ridge alderman in Wards 1, 3, 5 and 7, of which only Wards 1 and 3 have contested races (Andrea Cline v. John Moran, and Rick Van Roeyen v. Bob Wilkening);
• Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 Board, where four candidates are running for three 4-year terms (Tony Borrelli v. Greg Bublitz v. Mark Eggemann v. Tom Sotos), and one candidate, Bob Johnson, is running unopposed for a 2-year term;
• Maine Twp. High School District 207 Board, with six candidates running for three 4-year terms (Paula Besler v. Theresa Collins v. Jill Dolan v. Chimanial Patel v. Pablo Morales v. Sean Sullivan);
• the Park Ridge Park District Board, for which there are four candidates running for three 4-year terms (Cynthia Grau v. Jim O’Brien v. Mary Wynn Ryan v. Mel Thillens); and
• the Oakton Community College Board, where five candidates are running for two 6-year terms (Thresa Bashiri-Remetio v. Christopher Evdoxiadis v. Constantine Ress v. Benjamin Salzberg v. William Stafford).

Although we don’t particularly care for the “forum” format in which each candidate speaks for around four minutes and fields no questions from his/her opponents or the audience, we understand the difficulties of implementing a “debate” format with so many candidates. Nevertheless, this event is worthy of your attention because it will be the first – and perhaps only – time where voters can expect to see and hear all the candidates for these offices in one place.

And that’s important.

While the now-ubiquitous websites and flyers can give you a lot of useful information about the candidates, seeing and hearing them in person is one of the best ways – if not the best way – to judge their sincerity, genuineness and credibility. That’s why the truth-seeking function of our judicial system is based on a judge and jury getting the opportunity to take the measure of witnesses in person.

And with our state and its subsidiary local governmental units in such cumulatively dire economic straits, electing the most qualified, sincere, genuine and credible candidates means more today than ever before.  So it’s pretty darned sad that we have two uncontested aldermanic races, and effectively only one contested race for the D-64 Board and the Park Board.  And then folks wonder why Illinois is in the mess it is!

The most important races are for the boards of the two school districts, which consume almost 70% of our property taxes.

Over the past several years their rankings vis-à-vis the public schools of other comparably-affluent communities (and of the Chicago magnet schools) have dropped considerably from the days when Maine South was a fixture among the Top Five public high schools in Illinois – and similar regard was given D-64 schools as being the principal feeder system for Maine South.

Meanwhile, both districts’ teachers and administrators appear to be among the highest paid, thanks to elected school board members who don’t seem to understand that they are supposed to be representing the taxpayers’ interests every bit as much as the students’ interests. Or the concept of paying for performance. Or of not being sock puppets for the teachers’ unions. Or of doing things of consequence out in the open instead of hiding in closed sessions, as we wrote about in our 08.29.14 post.

The D-64 Board members elected in April also will be charged with negotiating the next D-64 teachers contract in 2016. That may be the single biggest responsibility they will have during their four years in office.

The good news is that neither of the perpetrators of the last negotiated-in-secret sweetheart teachers contract – current Board member John Heyde and former board member Pat Fioretto – will be part of that process. The bad news is that Heyde’s “Mini Me,” Scott Zimmerman, will be the most senior Board member and likely to lead the negotiating team; and the rest of the current Board have shown themselves to be more sock puppet than steel-spined when it comes to fiscal matters.

The candidates in the two contested races for the City Council, on the other hand, seem to be focused on the issue of flooding. The decisive question there may end up being who is less of a one-trick pony and more of a big-picture visionary.

And we wonder whether the Park Board incumbents will even attempt to alibi/justify/spin the quality of their stewardship under which the District has taken on around $19 million of new long-term debt, $7 million of which (for the Centennial water park) never even went to referendum, and the remainder of which – for the new Prospect Park – went to referendum only because the $7 million water park debt used up most of the District’s limited non-referendum borrowing power.

So bundle up and come on out to the South Park Field House tonight to see and hear the candidates who want your vote, and control over your tax dollars, for the next several years.  Give yourself the best possible chance to make the best possible decision on election day.

Or you can always take the easy way out and move to Chicago – where “participatory government” means selling your soul, and your finances, to Mayor Tiny Dancer.

To read or post comments, click on title.

In two posts back in November and December we had some choice words for some of our elected representatives on the Park Ridge-Niles District 64 School Board who were looking down their noses at the idea of checking into whether all kids attending D-64 schools – and getting $14,000/year per kid educations for free, courtesy of Park Ridge taxpayers – actually resided in the District.

So we felt pleased and somewhat vindicated to read yesterday’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate article reporting that this past Monday (Feb. 9) night the D-64 Board voted to conduct residency checks for all students enrolled for the 2015-16 school year (“District 64 Board approves annual residency checks,” Feb. 10).

And we have to give Supt. Laurie Heinz props for coming up with three options for the residency checks: Option A, with checks every three years; Option B, with families checked every year via in-person presentation of residency documentation; and Option C, being the same as Option B but with residency documents simply being sent in.

While we prefer Option B, any of the three would be better than the Swiss-cheese residency check system that’s currently in place and that actually might be allowing people who owned a home in Park Ridge five or even ten years ago to continue to send their kids to D-64 schools even if they sold that home and moved to Niles, Des Plaines, or Edison Park.

But nothing ever seems to be an unqualified “win,” much less a “win-win,” for either the students or the taxpayers at D-64.

So when Board member John Heyde and his coat-holding acolyte, Scott Zimmerman, once again objected to any residency checks as being “too burdensome” for residents, Heinz immediately scrambled for a “compromise” to mollify them. And consistent with the view that compromise produces a camel when what you really need is a thoroughbred, Heinz’s compromise was Option A (an every-three year check) but applied to only half of District families!

Seriously.

Fortunately, Board president Tony Borrelli and members Dan Collins, Bob Johnson, Dathan Paterno and Vicki Lee resisted getting sucked down that rabbit hole into Heyde’s and Zimm’s own special non-accountability wonderland; and that absurd compromise was defeated 5-2.

But it sounds as if the residency check for this coming school year will be a “trial” – with the expectation that if the first year’s check doesn’t disclose a significant enough number of scofflaws, the Board would cancel the residency checks for future years. What that “significant enough” number might be, however, apparently was not discussed by a Board and administration that historically treats concrete, measurable performance goals like plague-ridden rats.

Considering that each scofflaw student represents $14,000 of cost, however, just three or four scofflaws could cover the cost of one relatively “junior” D-64 teacher – assuming the Board and Administration don’t come up with ways to seriously dilute those savings by heavily padding the costs of conducting the checks.

The two most notable Board member comments on that issue, based on the H-A article, were from Collins and Paterno.

Collins, who has two children in District schools and who was the only Board member to vote against “free” (i.e., taxpayer-paid) Chromebooks, apparently went beyond his own personal opinion and made the effort to talk to District parents about the annual residency checks. And he reported – not surprisingly to us – that everyone he talked to thought annual checks were “a great idea.”

We’re betting he would have received an even more ringing endorsement from those District taxpayers without kids in D-64 schools who just pay the bills.

Paterno, on the other hand, reportedly dismissed the checks thusly: “We should at least do it once, and if we don’t catch anybody, we’d know it was a waste of time.” Kind of like the DEA raiding a suspected drug house once, finding no drugs, and never checking it again.

With that kind of attitude (reportedly joined in by Vicki Lee) combined with Heyde’s and Zimm’s outright opposition to residency checks, it sounds like a majority of the D-64 Board might be engineering the “trial” for failure and sabotaging it right from the get-go.

And, not surprisingly, according to the H-A article the Board didn’t even specify whether the District will use Option B or Option C.  That left filling that decision-making void to D-64 Public Information Coordinator (a/k/a, Propaganda Minister) Bernadette Tramm, who reportedly confirmed to Pioneer Press that the Board is leaving those kinds of details up to “the district administration.”

Big mistake, or bad idea?

Unless a few Board members grow spines pretty quickly and force the bureaucrats to put in place a transparent, clearly-understandable residency check process with specifically measurable goals, the one-year “trial” might very well be both.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Today we’re borrowing a page from Ira Glass’ “This American Life” with two shorter-than-our-usual posts, which we will introduce in TAL fashion: 

Act One. Cindy’s Victory.

Cindy Grau reportedly has won her battle to be on the ballot in April’s Park Ridge Park District Board election. She will face off against incumbents Jim O’Brien, Mary Wynn Ryan and Mel Thillens. According to Ms. Grau, the hearing officer denied all the objections raised by Charlene Foss-Eggemann.

Our takes on this matter can be found in our 01.07.15 and 01.13.15 posts.

Not so fortunate, however, was Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District candidate Kristin Gruss, who reportedly was removed from the April ballot when a hearing officer determined that she did not have the required 50 legitimate signatures on the petitions she filed.

We congratulate Ms. Grau on her victory and hope this serves as an object lesson to prospective candidates on the value of knowing, understanding and following the Illinois election laws; and on the risks inherent in not going so. Running for the boards of governmental bodies that control the expenditure of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars isn’t like running for student council. And, like it or not, the politics of such elections “ain’t beanbag” – even in sleepy ol’ Park Ridge.

Act Two. Liquor Liberalization.

A report in this week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Park Ridge looks to extend liquor sale hours at restaurants, stores,” Jan. 27) suggests that Park Ridge is bringing some long-overdue sanity to its arcane and antiquated liquor laws.

If the City Council approves the liquor law rewrite achieved through the yeoman’s efforts of 4th Ward Ald. Roger Shubert, the liquor code’s current 27 license classifications will be reduced to 8. At the same time, restaurants will be able to serve alcohol from 11:00 a.m. until 2:00 a.m.; and the sale of packaged alcohol will be permitted from 7:00 a.m. until 11:00 p.m.

We applaud anything that makes the liquor code less like something Carrie Nation would have drafted had she lived to see both the Volstead Act and the passage of the 21st Amendment. While alcohol abuse is a significant problem of many dimensions, no legitimate public purpose is well-served by the current regulations. And, frankly, we think it would make even more sense to permit alcohol sales by restaurants and retail stores during whatever their regular business hours, without imposing other arbitrary hours solely for liquor sales.

In that regard we take issue with the argument of Maine Community Youth Assistance Foundation director Teri Collins, who reportedly expressed concern that longer sales hours might give teens more opportunities to purchase alcohol and stated: “We don’t want increased access to alcohol by minors.”

Neither do we, Ms. Collins. But last time we looked, it was illegal for restaurants and retail establishments to sell alcohol to minors. So competent enforcement of the laws already on the books should be taking care of that already.

But if it isn’t, we learned 80+ years ago that prohibition – even if it’s only a partial prohibition through reducing the hours of alcohol sale – isn’t a workable solution to that problem. Better enforcement, and even heavier penalties, is.

To read or post comments, click on title.

How many of you know about or remember Park Ridge-Niles School District 64’s current “five-year plan” – “A Journey of Excellence” – to accelerate the use of technology from 2010 to 2015? If you don’t, there’s no need to get your undies in a bunch, because it is expiring this year.

We’ve written about “A Journey of Excellence” and what appears to be its lack of meaningful academic achievement in the past, including in our 05.15.09, 09.16.09, 06.06.11, 09.08.14 and 09.18.14 posts.  We’ve noted how D-64 keeps getting away with spending hundreds of millions of our tax dollars doing what legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden always discouraged with the warning “Don’t mistake activity for achievement.”

But if you have a perverse fascination for trying to figure out how D-64 keeps getting away with it, you might actually enjoy D-64’s website history of the expiring “Journey” – starting with the “4-page PDF list including Action Plans” (with its page 2 commitment that “Student performance on the…(ISATs) will always compare favorably with other high-achieving districts”) and the colorful “Strategic Plan Implementation Schedule 2012-13”.

Not surprisingly, we couldn’t find any reports, presentations, news releases, or any other form of communication on that “Strategic Plan” webpage – the latest of which is dated April 22, 2013 – that actually shows, or even talks about, how D-64’s ISATs “compare favorably with other high-achieving districts.” In fact, we Googled for a solid 20 minutes and could not come up with one instance of D-64’s Board or administration providing any objective and/or numerical comparisons of D-64 ISATs that demonstrate favorable comparisons with other “high-achieving districts.”

That’s because D-64 has learned that dangling the carrot of increased achievement is a great marketing tool for convincing wishful parents and gullible taxpayers that there really are silver bullets for achieving academic excellence; and that D-64 has come up with them through its latest five-year plan. And once that convincing has occurred, making sure those parents and taxpayers don’t realize they’ve been snookered is the key to D-64’s ability to dangle another carrot in front of them five years later.

Which is what it’s doing with the announcement that it is forming a 30-35 member “Strategic Planning Steering Committee” to help the District create a new five-year plan that will “identify the most important challenges District 64 will need to address in the next five years, and how the District might go about planning for those challenges,” according to Supt. Laurie Heinz.

For those of you who have been through these goat rodeos before, you won’t be surprised to read such cliches as “community-driven strategic planning process” that will involve “a wide range of community stakeholders” and allow “all stakeholders…to contribute their ideas and vision” by…wait for it…”completing a survey or participating in a focus group.”

What would one of these rodeos be without stakeholders, surveys and focus groups?

And just for good measure, the committee “will be guided by a highly experienced, outside facilitator” who will be paid a sizable chunk of our tax dollars to make sure all the goats get herded in exactly the direction the D-64 administration and the Park Ridge Education Association (“PREA,” a/k/a the teachers union) want them to go.

It won’t be as impressive as John Wayne surveying a herd of steers and saying “Take ’em to Missouri, Matt,” but it’s likely to be as close as you’re going to get with goats and government.

At the risk (albeit a minute one) of taking away all the fun, expense and faux suspense of this strategic planning goat rodeo, however, we offer the following “challenges” D-64 will need to address within the next five years:

1.  Improving the quality of D-64 education so that student performance and other measurable values actually provide a formidable incentive to our higher-achieving and more demanding current residents to stay here rather than to emigrate to Glenview, Northbrook, Northfield, Wilmette, etc. for their better-scoring school districts; and a formidable incentive for such achieving/demanding non-residents to relocate to Park Ridge instead of to Glenview, Northbrook, et al.

2.  Negotiating a taxpayer-focused collective bargaining agreement with the PREA in 2016 that ends automatic annual raises to teachers for no improved student performance. During the five years of “A Journey of Excellence,” base teacher salaries have increased a total of 11% (not counting “step” and “lane” increases, or any “spikes” for soon-to-retire teachers in order to juice-up pensions) while student achievement based on ISATs appears to have been flat or declined in comparison to “high-achieving districts.”

3.  Convincing folks whose kids have finished using D-64 (and D-207) education that such education will continue to improve and provide an increasing cost-benefit value that will ensure continued appreciation of their home value, thereby discouraging the economic death spiral of current/imminent net-payers selling their homes to current/imminent net-users – the former of whom pay roughly $4,000 of RE taxes to D-64 while the latter of whom pay that same $4,000 but take out $14,000 per kid of “free” education.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for D-64’s Board, administration, or any “highly experienced outside facilitator” to focus on these kinds of “challenges.” They’ll be too busy trying to herd the goats into the pen they’ve already chosen for the next five years.

Just as soon as they declare the most recent five-year plan a shining success simply because it put an iPad or Chromebook in every kid’s hands.

To read or post comments, click on title.

In our November 28 post we wrote about how Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 had finally figured out that it might be giving away hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars by not confirming that every student receiving a free D-64 education actually lived in the District.

But while it is gratifying to read that the School Board might actually be trying to finally address that problem, a recent Park Ridge Herald-Advocate story (“District 64 considers further residency requirement changes,” Dec. 19) raises new questions about D-64’s ability to be competent stewards of the taxpayers’ money that leave us scratching our heads and reminding ourselves of manager Casey Stengel’s indictment of his own New York Mets back in 1962:

“Can’t anybody here play this game?” 

At the School Board’s December 15 meeting, Board member Dan Collins – the only one with the integrity and fiscal responsibility to have argued against free (i.e., at the taxpayers’ expense instead of the parents’) Chromebooks even though his household would receive two of them worth over $600 – argued for residency checks for every grade instead of just at enrollment, and again at entering third and sixth grades. 

But this Board apparently is still driving under the influence of its senior – and most fiscally irresponsible – member, John Heyde. Consequently, it is continuing to look for plausible ways not to require annual residency checks for kids whose parents expect $14,000 (or $28,000, or $42,000, depending on number of kids in District schools) of free D-64 education. 

Not surprisingly, Heyde is appalled that parents might have to endure what he has called the “pain in the neck” of proving their kids’ residency on an annual basis when, instead, he can simply dump any additional financial burdens of educating kids who don’t live in the District on its beleaguered taxpayers. 

We suggested a no-cost way of doing the residency checks in that 11.28.14 post. But anything that won’t stiff the taxpayers or enrich public employees, preferably at the same time, is rarely (if ever) to Heyde’s liking. So with no shortage of encouragement from Heyde, the Board is having a cost-benefit analysis done, presumably one that will predict a boatload of expense for a mere bucket-full of savings. That’s usually the way these kinds of things are done.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, D-64 is looking to make it even easier for non-resident kids to get a free D-64 education.

The Board is thinking about letting kids who don’t actually live in the District – but whose families are allegedly in the process of building or renovating homes in the District – attend District schools for free for the 18 months prior to the construction/renovation being completed.

The current policy is that kids can start D-64 schools only 60 days before occupancy, although we have no idea what happens if the kid starts school and then the family doesn’t move into their new/newly-renovated home. Given the currently inept state of residency non-checks, however, we suspect the kid could be going to D-64 schools for years while living in Edison Park, Norridge, Des Plaines, etc.

But where the real mental breakdown occurs is in what passes for the thought process of the Board members when it comes to the traditional benchmark qualification for free education: the concept of “residency.” Either kids live in the District or they don’t.

What benefit to the existing District taxpayers is achieved by letting kids who don’t live in the District attend District schools FOR FREE for 18 months?

According to Board member Scott Zimmerman (Heyde’s very own “Mini-Me”), free non-resident education should be extended for at least 18 months, and even up to 24 months, before residency actually occurs.

Why?

Zimm blames the slow speed of construction in Park Ridge!  And if that’s not dumb enough for you, try this one: “These people…are building homes and increasing property values in the district. I’d like to encourage that.”

There you have it, folks…further proof that Mark Twain was right when he said: “God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.”

Not content to have bungled his assigned task of making sure D-64 is producing the very best educational value for its students and its taxpayers in return for the high taxes we already pay to D-64, Zimmerman is now trying to play economist by shifting his attention to faux-stimulating the local real estate market through giving away as much as $28,000 per kid of D-64 education to NON-RESIDENTS whose parents already are committed to building/renovating a Park Ridge home!

Zimm could have lifted that bright idea right out of a scene from the movie “Dave.”

And it may have inspired fellow Board member Dathan Paterno to chime in with the equally goofy observation: “As long as they’re paying taxes on the property, they’re putting money into the system.”

By that kind of un-reasoning, should a Chicago family living in Norwood Park that owns a Park Ridge condo it rents out for $1,000/month to a senior citizen be able to send their kids to D-64 schools because they are “paying taxes on the property” and “putting money into the system”?

Chalk that up as just another sick joke on the taxpayers passing for stewarsdship from our elected representatives on the D-64 Board – one they are supposed to be voting on at their January 26 meeting, along with whether to do residency checks on the kids of homeowners more frequently than just at the time of initial enrollment.

If your sense of humor runs to the twisted and absurd, feel free to “Ha! Hah!! Hah!!!” Or, given the season, “Ho! Ho!! Ho!!!”

But if you’re a D-64 taxpayer, you’re still getting coal.

To read or make comments, click on title.

The Discovery Channel has “Shark Week,” so we’ve decided to make this “D-64 Week.”

And you thought sharks were scary.

Now that D-64 has once again jacked up its tax levy by a vote of 6-1 (Board member Dathan Paterno dissenting), we thought we would take a look at a very simple financial issue that, nevertheless, has remained unresolved by the D-64 brain trust for over a year since we last wrote about it in our post “Herd Mentality Does Not Justify D-64’s Bovine Thinking On Student Fees”: school fees.

We got a couple of over-the-transom inquiries about this topic, apparently because it became a sidebar discussion in connection with a tax levy post last week (December 10) on the Park Ridge Citizens Online Facebook page. According to comments on that blog, D-64’s continuing lackadaisical efforts to collect unpaid fees has left over $100,000 due and owing.

One complaint that those who don’t pay at all (we like to call them “freeloaders”) share with a smaller group of critics who claim to be paying under protest, is that D-64 has failed and refused to provide itemized statements of what the fees cover. One might have expected that by now, more than a year after folks like Kathy Ranalli and George Korovilas began railing about it, D-64’s administrators – hello, overpaid (over $215,000/year) Business Manager Rebecca Allard– might have actually done that.

But no-oooooooooo!

The transparency-challenged D-64 administration can’t quite seem to fess up and tell the parents of D-64 students for what exactly it is that they’re paying $84, or $227, or $315 of annual fees – even though parents reportedly are being charged only around 55% of the total cost of those unidentified/un-itemized materials and services for which the fees are assessed. And our alleged “representatives” on the School Board seem totally disinterested in forcing the reluctant administrators to disclose this information.  Or maybe it’s yet another case of the Board being totally intimidated by the “education professionals.”

That’s just plain stupid and irresponsible. Unfortunately, stupid and irresponsible seems to be D-64’s default setting – as demonstrated by its decision to switch from a parent-paid monitoring program for students who stay at school for lunch, which will now cost the District (a/k/a, the taxpayers) another-$400,000.

But let’s not kid ourselves about one main fact.

Even if D-64’s Board and administration actually did the right thing and provided parents with a list of fees itemized down to the penny, the freeloader contingent would still rail about how charging ANY fees violates the Illinois constitution’s requirement that students be provided a “free” education. That’s because those shameless freeloaders have no problem insisting that their kids are entitled to “free” $14,000/student/year educations because they pay taxes: $3-4-5-6,000 to D-64 on a total property tax bill of $9-12-15-18,000, respectively.

And from our experience, it’s the ones running two or three of their kids through the schools – at at total cost of $28,000-42,000 a year worth of education for that same $3-4-5-6,000 of property taxes – who beef the loudest about paying a few hundred dollars in fees. They’re also the ones who occasionally threaten legal action against the District if it takes any collection action against their freeloading.

As if these freeloaders would actually dig into their own pockets to pay several thousand dollars of legal fees when then won’t even pay $84 of school fees!

But in the hope of taking at least one more bogus argument off the table regarding this fee issue – that fees are “illegal” – we direct your attention to the case of Beck v. Board of Education of Harlem Consolidated School District No. 122, an Illinois Supreme Court decision from 1976 that appears to still be the law of this state.

The father of some students sued the school board for charging him fees for school supplies and materials furnished his children, arguing that such charges were illegal. Our Supreme Court said he was wrong, relying on its prior decisions that traced the concept of “free schools” from Illinois’ achieving statehood in 1818 in order to ascertain the intent of the Illinois constitution and statutes relevant to state-provided education.

Rather than our paraphrasing the Court’s reasoning, here is exactly how then-Justice Goldenhersh explained it:

[P]arents of pupils financially able to do so have been required to provide their children with textbooks, writing materials and other supplies prescribed by the school board and required for the personal use of the students. ( 47 Ill.2d 480, 486—90, 265 N.E.2d 616.) Sections 10—20.5 and 10—20.8 of the School Code (Ill.Rev.Stat.1973,*16 ch. 122, pars. 10—20.5 and 10—20.8) respectively authorize the board to adopt and enforce all necessary rules for the management and government of the school, and to direct what branches of study shall be taught and what apparatus shall be used. Under these sections defendant was authorized to require parents financially able to do so to provide their children with educational materials and supplies for use by them or on their behalf. We are of the opinion that defendant was authorized to accomplish the same result by purchasing the necessary materials and supplies, apportioning the cost among the pupils, and charging those parents who were financially able to pay, and we so hold. We also hold that because some of the materials were used by more than one pupil or by a teacher or administrator, or that they might be retained as school property and used for more than one school year did not serve to convert the fee charged into a tuition charge. Tuition is defined as ‘the price of or payment for instruction’ (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1961)), and, clearly, the fee charged plaintiff’s children was not part of the price of, or payment for, instruction.

That surely won’t please the freeloader contingent, but nothing less than “free” (compliments of their fellow taxpayers) ever does.

So unless somebody has some more convincing legal authority than the Beck decision, it’s time that D-64 told the scofflaw parents to pay up or be subject to the full panoply of lawful collection efforts – except for those precious few parents who can actually demonstrate that they are not “financially able to pay.”

Or if D-64 wants to spare the taxpayers the costs of such additional collection efforts, it should simply publish the names and addresses of all these “fee freeloaders” so that their friends and neighbors might know them.

That way, the friends and neighbors who are covering those costs can thank them personally for their freeloader-ship.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Tonight the Board of Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 will hold what is called a “public hearing” on the proposed 4.6% hike to the District’s tax levy.

That means the hearing is open to the “public” even if, in reality, the true “public” rarely shows up.

One reason for the no-shows is that these tax levy hearings are always held less than two weeks before Christmas. According to the minutes of last year’s levy hearing, only “three members of the public” attended, none of whom were identified. For all we know, they might have been Danish foreign exchanges students earning meeting observation credits.

The other reason for the low attendance might be that the 60-70% of District taxpayers who have no children in D-64 schools and, therefore, no DIRECT stake in its product, seem to have given up hope that D-64 can curb its tax-borrow-and-spend ways, or that it will begin delivering an objectively-measurable, top-shelf education that might provide some measurable INDIRECT benefit to those taxpayers in the form of higher property values.

Such a lack of hope is understandable, given last week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate article about the 4.6 levy (“District 64 poised to raise tax levy by 4.6 percent,” Dec. 10), which described one of the D-64 Board’s “Consensus Goals” for the 2013-2015 school years as:

“[T]ry to get as much tax revenue as it can collect without increasing tax rates to the point that [a] voter referendum would be needed to approve them.”

In other words, shake down the taxpayers for as much as you can without letting them vote on how much their pockets are being picked.

Referendums are anathema to most school boards because they increase taxpayer scrutiny, even if only for a few months. And taxpayer scrutiny is the last thing D-64 wants, given how well the “combine” of PREA-dominated teachers, complicit school administrators and PREA-friendly/owned Board members have mastered the art of avoiding any accountability for the modest educational achievement D-64 has been returning on all the money it wrings out of Park Ridge taxpayers.

Ask why not even one D-64 school is consistently listed among the annual ISAT-based rankings of the Top 50 Chicagoland elementary or middle schools by the Chicago Tribune or the Sun-Times, even though we pay some of the highest teacher and administrator salaries, and you get…nothing.  <Crickets>

Not even any official acknowledgement of those rankings, and our schools’ absence therefrom, from either those highly-paid administrators or our alleged “representatives” on the School Board.

And for those of you who view Schooldigger as a credible rating service, its latest rankings place no D-64 school among its Top 100 Illinois Elementary Schools, and no D-64 school among its Top 100 Illinois Middle Schools.

Fortunately, the proposed 4.6% levy increase that will pass tonight is likely to end up around 1.7% once the Cook County Assessor’s office applies the tax caps: at the November 17 Board meeting Allard admitted as much, stating her expectation that the actual increase would be only around 1.7%.

We still have to wonder, however, why D-64 is approving a 4.6% levy increase, or even shooting for a 1.7% increase, when it’s already sitting on around $61 million in “fixed investments” and money market funds, according to the first page of Allard’s 12.15.14 “Executive Summary”. That’s over 77% of D-64’s 2014-15 Tentative Budget with no reason to think D-64 won’t collect the money it will be taxing during 2015 and beyond.

And we can’t help but suspect that there’s something fishy about yet another levy increase when such a large fund balance exists, especially when we consider that there are four (4) School Board seats – a majority, for the mathematically impaired among us – subject to contestation in this April’s election: John Heyde’s, Dan Collins’ and Tony Borrelli’s 4-year seats; and the final 2 years of Terry Cameron’s seat now held by appointee Bob Johnson.

Could a 77% fund balance be part of some strategy for Board incumbents to tout their stewardship during their re-election campaigns?

Ironically, today also is the first day of the 1-week period (ending next Monday, December 22) during which candidates for those Board seats can file their nominating petitions (we understand a minimum of 50 signatures are needed) and required statements of economic interest. Two years ago only six candidates vied for four openings, and only 32% of eligible voters turned out – electing 3 of the 4 most PREA-friendly candidates on the ballot (Zimmerman, Lee and Cameron).

PREA-friendliness is even more significant this time around because the Board that results from April’s election will be in charge of negotiating the next PREA contract in 2016.

If you go back and read our 09.27.12 post and our 10.13.12 post, you will get a sense of how having a PREA friendly/owned Board majority enabled the PREA to negotiate in secret with D-64’s bargaining reps, Heyde and then-Board member/one-term wonder (and union attorney) Pat Fioretto.  Not surprisingly, those closed door sessions led to a four-year sweetheart contract for the PREA that appear to have made/kept our teachers among the highest paid in Illinois, albeit without producing commensurately high-ranked ISAT scores from their students.

And getting an even sweeter deal this time around is why the PREA has targeted this April’s election, according to PREA President Andy Duerkop’s “President’s Message” of 10.27.14: “A number of PREA members have been working to recruit candidates from the community….”

Of the four sitting Board members whose seats are up in April, only Borrelli – whom we endorsed (along with Collins) in 2011 – has voted against a PREA contract. Unfortunately, since then, the vast majority of his votes suggest that he has “drunk the Kool-Aid” (or, if you prefer, “gone native”); and although we would love to be proved wrong on this, it appears that he cannot currently be counted on to champion the taxpayers’ interests over the monetary interests of the PREA.

Will any candidates with the kind of iron will and overarching public spiritedness needed to overcome D-64’s culture of underperformance, and to demand both measurably better education for students and better value for Park Ridge taxpayers, step up to challenge the D-64 pay-for-underperformance status quo?

You can be sure the PREA is hoping that answer is “no”…if only for just the next seven days.

UPDATE (12.17.14)  The levy was approved by a vote of 6 – 1 (Paterno).  Only two members of the “public” showed up to address the Board on the levy, but that’s a 100% increase over last year.

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One of the many pleasures of the holiday season is the proliferation of holiday movies.

We try not to miss Frank Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life,” the gold standard of Christmas movies and currently No. 20 on the AFI Top 100 list. We can’t help but chuckle when Clarence orders “mulled wine, heavy on the cinnamon and light on the cloves” from the Pottersville version of Nick the bartender, and try as we might we can’t keep from getting misty every time those good folks of Bedford Falls come up big to save George and the Bailey Bros. Building & Loan from prison and ruin.

But running a close second in our book is 1942’s “Holiday Inn.”

The combination of Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Marjorie Reynolds and an original Irving Berlin score that debuted the iconic “White Christmas” is tough to beat. And “Holiday Inn” contains more top-shelf Berlin tunes than just “White Christmas,” one of our favorites being Crosby’s Thanksgiving number called “I’ve Got Plenty To Be Thankful For.” 

That’s the way we felt yesterday after reading “District 64 considers changing residency verification policy” (November 25) in this week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate, and realizing how the Park Ridge-Niles District 64 School Board – and long-time Board member John Heyde in particular – keeps providing one object lesson after another on how a local governmental body can spend more and more tax dollars running an underachieving school system.

According to the H-A article, D-64 finally got the bright idea that it might be giving away $14,000 of its taxpayers’ hard-earned money on each student who is not actually living in the District and whose parents aren’t paying property taxes, either directly as homeowners or indirectly as renters.

Not surprisingly, however, D-64 didn’t come up with this bright idea on its own.

It had to borrow it from Maine Twp. High School Dist. 207, which decided several years ago that ferretting out all those non-resident students and their…wait for it…parasite parents who were helping themselves to free $17,000/year D-207 educations was well worth the cost of doing so.

According to D-64’s overpaid (at around $220,000/year, not counting every bennie) finance superintendent, Rebecca Allard, students whose parents own an in-district residence (house, townhouse or condo) have their residency checked only once: when those students are initially enrolled. So if a family packs up and moves out of the District, its kindergarten –aged student could remain enrolled in D-64 schools without the parents paying any taxes toward the $14,000 per-student annual cost until the student graduated middle school as much as 8 years later.

Total cost to the District’s taxpayers for such a grades 1-8 scam: a whopping $112,000. Per student.

Because D-64 hasn’t been checking the residency of students from purported Park Ridge homeowners other than at enrollment, we’d bet dollars to donuts that these kinds of scams have been run to the detriment of D-64 taxpayers for years, perhaps costing millions of dollars.

And even though the residency of students of renter families is reportedly checked annually, that still might not provide all that much more fiscal integrity.

That’s because for years there have been rumors of families from Chicago’s northwest side neighborhoods renting one bedroom condos in Bristol Court, Park Ridge Pointe, or smaller multi-family developments for between $12,000-$18,000/year just to establish an in-district address so they can get $28,000 (for 2 students) or $42,000 (for 3 students) of D-64 education – or from $34,000 to $51,000 of D-207 education – rather than sending their kids to Ebinger. Norwood Park, Taft, or paying private school tuition.

With that much money on the line one would think that, once the D-64 Board members understood how much taxpayer money they might be losing, they would get right after implementing a solution to this problem. Like maybe adopting D-207’s policy of checking every student’s residency every year.

But one would be wrong.

The overpaid Allard, while explaining a process like the one used by D-207, immediately disparaged it by pointing out how “labor-intensive” it would be, noting all the overtime that would have to be paid to District employees.

But Allard’s reluctance is nothing compared to that of our elected D-64 Board members who are supposed to be keeping an eye on spendthrift bureaucrats, incompetent teachers, and the overall cost-effectiveness of how our property taxes are being used in the interest of education.

Both Board President Tony Borrelli and member Vicki Lee seem to be looking for some kind of on-line way of avoiding the in-person show-up process that D-207’s Supt. Ken Wallace claims is most effective in catching violators.

But leave it to Heyde to show, once again, how little respect he has for the taxpayers who educated his own kids and who provide all those tax dollars that he has been throwing at underperforming teachers and administrators alike.

Heyde not only echoed the overpaid Allard’s concern about employee overtime, but he went her one better by whining about the inconvenience of a D-207-like process to D-64 parents:

“What District 207 is doing is a pain in the neck for parents. My question would be – do we think we’re going to find enough kids who don’t belong in our schools that it’s worth the burden on the families? Not to mention the cost to the taxpayers in terms of overtime.”

In other words, it’s the convenience of D-64 parents – who already are getting around a 200% return on the D-64 portion of their property taxes for just their first D-64 student, and who are getting an extra 300% return for each additional D-64 student – that is more important to the sensitive Heyde (and to Lee and Borrelli?) than whether the taxpayers are getting ripped off by non-resident parasites who have no qualms about scamming FREE D-64 educations for their kids.

Since the overpaid Allard and the sensitive-spendthrift Heyde can’t seem to figure this out on their own, we’ll offer this suggestion to alleviate any concerns about the cost of employee overtime in this residency-check process:

Instead of paying employees to do these basically clerical residency checks, how about recruiting all those PTO-member volunteers who devote scores of hours to saving $10-20,000 a year on photocopying and clerical costs, or who spend hundreds of hours planning and staging variety shows to raise similar bucks?  Then the cost of the checks would be virtually nothing.

Fortunately, all reports are that the overpaid Allard will be riding off into retirement and her guaranteed six-figure-pension in June 2015.

Unfortunately, we haven’t heard any similar report about whether the sensitive-spendthrift will try for another four years of dis-serving D-64 students and disrespecting D-64 taxpayers. And since another teachers union contract negotiation is coming up in 2016, we can see how Heyde might want to stick around for at least a couple more years to negotiate one last sweetheart contract that meets or exceeds the one he and then-fellow Board negotiator Pat “One-and-Done” Fioretto pushed through 3 years ago.

The only silver lining to this latest tale of D-64 Board buffoonery is that Board member Dathan Paterno appears to have climbed off his anti-Common Core bandwagon long enough to actually make some salient observations about the need for much better residency oversight, to wit: “If we can dissuade others from [stealing D-64 educations]…at a certain point, we won’t need to do this.”

Let’s hope so, although parasites are extremely difficult to dissuade – as the Library species, and the number and ferocity of its defenders, already have demonstrated.

But if this effort is successful, maybe then the D-64 Board can start figuring out how to provide the kind of educational quality and measurable performance that comes a lot closer to matching what D-64 taxpayers are being forced to finance.

To read or post comments, click on title.

We’re always looking to see how our two local school districts are doing in comparison to the schools in other comparable upper-level communities. 

That’s because we believe that top-shelf schools at a reasonable price can be a difference-maker for folks considering moving to not-inexpensive suburbs like Park Ridge. And even at a high price, top-shelf schools can still add enough value to be a difference-maker. 

Which should mean better education for the kids and higher property values for the taxpayers. 

But as we’ve pointed out repeatedly, although Park Ridge public schools are better than most they no longer appear to rank among the very best – judging by the annual ISAT-based rankings that both Chicago newspapers (and sometimes Chicago magazine) put out – despite Park Ridge taxpayers continuing to pay top-shelf prices for those schools.

Over-payment for under-performance is never a good strategy.

So a recent Park Ridge Journal article with the title “District 64 Prepares For Strategic Planning” (09.11.14) caught our eye. It talked about how Park Ridge-Niles School Dist. 64, with one year still left on former Supt. Sally Pryor’s five year strategic plan, is looking to hire a consultant to assess where the District’s current situation. And new D-64 superintendent Laurie Heinz wants that assessment to be “a nice, objective look from highly trained professionals.”

Heinz’s consultant of choice? The Consortium for Educational Change (“CEC”).

Note the key words in the name: “educational change.” Not “educational excellence.” Not “educational achievement.” Not “educational improvement.” Not even “educational hope and change.”

Just “educational change.”

That’s because “change” is no longer merely inevitable: it’s now actually considered good. “New” – as in “different” – has replaced “new and improved,” presumably because novelty is all we need. The tiny-brained folks, encouraged by marketers, advertisers and politicians, now embrace anything new or different so long as it doesn’t require them to do the heavy lifting of determining whether that new or different is actually better.

And if better, whether the benefits meet or exceed the costs.

Then again, cost-benefit analyses are not the forte of most public school teachers and administrators. That holds true at D-64, including its School Board members who should be focused on the bottom line both educationally and financially. It comes as no shock, then, that the D-64 Board apparently has endorsed Heinz’s choice of CEC.

What is CEC?

According to the “About” page of its website, CEC claims to be:

“[A] nonprofit organization affiliated with the Illinois Education Association that works with teachers, school and district administrators, school boards and unions to improve student learning and achievement.”

In other words, it’s a teachers union-dominated private corporation with the audacity to claim that its goal is…wait for it…educational achievement.  Even if, by all outward appearances, “change” seems to be its greater concern.

And since it’s a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation, there are no pesky shareholders looking over CEC management’s shoulders making sure the services it provides are competent and valuable enough to generate profits that can be paid to those shareholders as dividends. That leaves CEC free to be a one-trick pony: a shameless cheerleader for unaccountable educators and administrators who hire it – presumably using taxpayer funds – to tell them what they want to hear.

What the D-64 Board, teachers and administrators DON’T want to hear is anything about ISAT-based performance rankings. Which is why a more-than-cursory Google search failed to disclose any public acknowledgement of those kinds of rankings by the D-64 Board or administration since Sally Pryor pushed the adoption of her “Journey of Excellence” plan four years earlier, before retiring with her guaranteed $183,400/year pension, avec COLAs.

Which is curious, given that one of the “Parameters” on page 2 of the “Strategic Plan Components” from the D-64 website states: “Student performance on the Illinois Standards Achievement Tests (ISATs) will always compare favorably with other high-achieving districts.”

Although edu-speak often is a totally foreign language, in common English the term “compare favorably with” customarily means “is better than.”

Does D-64 really need to hire a consultant like CEC to tell it how close it hasn’t come to meeting that particular performance “parameter”?

To read or post comments, click on title.

We’ve often criticized the lack of transparency and accountability from the two local taxing bodies who take more money out of Park Ridge property taxpayers’ pockets – approximately 66% combined – than all other taxing bodies cumulatively: Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 and Maine Township High School District 207.

Not surprisingly, both those governmental units have mastered the art of extracting larger and larger amounts of tax dollars from the citizenry while at the same time avoiding accountability for producing lower and lower levels of measurable performance and student achievement.

Nevertheless, both of those school districts have a cadre of committed apologists who respond to any criticism of their favored district in knee-jerk reactionary fashion. You can see prime examples of such reactions in the comments to our 08.29.14 post about D-207’s Board member appointment process – although it should be noted that 28 of those 45 comments existing as of the publishing of this post (8/29 at 10:11, 10:31, 10:47, 10:56 and 11:06 p.m.; 8/30 at 7:10, 7:35, 8:10, 9:22, 9:24, 9:43 a.m. and 5:30, 5:37, 5:43, 6:36, 7:07 and 7:23 p.m.; 8/31 at 8:46 a.m. and 1:58 p.m.; 9/1 at 11:31 a.m. and 12:05, 12:11, 2:34, 2:54 and 3:34 p.m.; and 9/2 at 3:53, 4:24 and 4:40 p.m.) were submitted by the same person.

A shy D-207 Board member, perhaps? Or a Board member’s spouse? Or just a D-207 toady?

Maybe that’s why we got some perverse satisfaction from the story in the current edition of the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate, “District 64 to hold Sept. 8 hearing on proposed budget,” (09.03.14), about tonight’s budget hearing scheduled for 7:15 p.m. at Jefferson School, 8200 Greendale Ave., in Niles.

Actually, it wasn’t the hearing itself that provoked a wry smile. It was wondering how the D-64 Board members could maintain straight faces while announcing the opportunity for members of the community to comment on the proposed 2014-15 budget while the District’s grossly overpaid (at close to $220,000 this school year) budget manager, Rebecca Allard, was declining to share the budget’s total revenues and expenses until the hearing itself because “[t]here are adjustments [to the budget] that the board has not seen.”

So much for any interested taxpayers or the local press showing up tonight with any advance knowledge of arguably the two most important components of that budget: revenues and expenses. And in addition to no final revenue and expense totals, Allard also said that the amount the District plans to spend on capital improvements won’t be disclosed before the hearing, either.

Just when we thought D-64 and its Board couldn’t be any less transparent or accountable, they give us a game of 20 questions masquerading as a “public budget hearing”…where even the Board members apparently won’t find out the answers until kick0ff!

That’s exactly what we’d expect out of Allard and the rest of the illusionists who run D-64 like a Vegas magic act, using sleight of hand to convince trusting and/or gullible parents and taxpayers alike that the tens of millions of dollars D-64 shakes them down for each year really do turn into marvelous educational achievement of equivalent or even greater value. Or into a white tiger, depending on whether you attend the matinee or the dinner show.

And, unfortunately, these D-64 Board members – whom we elected and entrusted with the duty to ensure that every tax dollar is spent in the most prudent manner so as to maximize its value to the students whom are its intended beneficiaries – are either bigger rubes than the rest of us in the audience, or they’re actually part of the  act and charged with getting us to look in the wrong direction so that we miss the bureaucrats’ false shuffles and their palming of the Ace of Spades.

Worse yet, the H-A article states that the D-64 Board approved a tentative budget back in July. So it appears that, for the past 30-plus days, Allard and her financial munchkins have been diddling each other when they should have been crunching numbers. Or they’ve actually been engaging in a deliberate effort to bamboozle the taxpayers by keeping enough loose ends and empty places in the budget so that neither the public nor the press can ask informed questions at tonight’s “public” hearing.

And if that means the D-64 Board is kept in the dark, so much the better – because neither the current Board nor any of its predecessor boards have let even pitch-blackness stop them from rubber-stamping whatever the bureaucrats du jour hand them. So even though the taxpayers – and the Board, apparently – have no idea what Allard’s “adjustments” will be tonight, that didn’t stop them from moving the process forward on what the H-A article blithely reports to be salary increases of 4.9%, along with an approximately 4% increase in benefits.

How many of you D-64 taxpayers are getting a 4.9% salary increase this year? How about a 4% benefit increase?

Actually, we’re not exactly sure where that 4.9% comes from, because Page 13 of the latest draft (No. 3) of the “Tentative Budget Review” dated September 8, 2014, states: “The [Educational Fund] salary budget is estimated to increase by $2,304,229 or 5.3% over the previous year’s actual expense.” And Page 15 states that “[s]alaries are anticipated to increase by $99,147 or 3.8%…[as] a result of 3.5% increases for all custodial and maintenance staff.”

As we’ve come to expect when dealing with public sector raises, none of these salary and benefit increases appear to be tied in any understandable way to measurably-improved employee performance, whether that comes in the form of more work performed, or the same amount of work performed in a better way, or some other objective measurement.

We also find it interesting that, according to Page 26 of the Tentative Budget Review, even though Board Policy 4:20 requires the District to maintain “four (4) months of operating expenditures” in reserve, the tentative budget projects year-end 2014-15 reserves of double that.

Can you say “slush fund”?

But our very favorite part of the budget documents is the Executive Summary section titled “Investments in Student Learning 2014-15,” which can be found on Pages 2-4.

It starts out talking about a “five-year plan” named “Journey of Excellence” whose “original planning horizon” has been reached, thereby requiring the creation of “a new multi-year Strategic Plan.” The irony of how the old Soviet Union always implemented five-year plans – which were never successful before being replaced by the next five-year plan that also never hit its marks – apparently was lost on budget-drafter Allard, despite her $220,000 annual compensation.

And judging by the District’s lackluster performance these past five years (and by what might be its adverse effects on Maine South’s rankings), the “Journey of Excellence” might not even qualify as “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”

The rest of that Executive Summary is loaded with edu-speak like: “Strategic Plan implementation activities will continue to be embedded within the District’s overall initiatives,” “job-embedded coaching,” “instructional shifts,” “[m]ath intervention for struggling learners,” “curricular pacing guides,” “supplemental learning experiences,” “dynamic and differentiated opportunities,” and what must be the term of the year for 2014-15: “release time.”

George Orwell would be proud of such edu-speak.

And “Winston Smith” would be confused and dismayed by it.

To read or post comments, click on title.