Last week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate reported that Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District 64 might need to resort to raising our property taxes now that federal funds aren’t being made available to pay for air conditioning and a new boiler for the heating system at Carpenter School (“Heating, AC issues at Carpenter have parents hot under the collar,” Dec. 2).
If that report is accurate, we have to wonder what’s up with District 64’s management.
Don’t get us wrong: we’re big fans of AC. We rank it right up there with fire and the wheel when talking about mankind’s greatest inventions. And heated schools are pretty useful, too.
But as we understand it, Carpenter never has had AC. So if kids really have been going home from school vomiting because of the heat – as Carpenter parent and former PTO president Brett Parker claims – why wasn’t the need for AC and a plan to fund it put in place years ago? And the same goes for the replacement of Carpenter’s 50-year old boiler?
Why is it that only now are we hearing D-64 Board president John Heyde warning of “big decisions” with “big costs” for ensuring that the District’s schools are “safe and healthy” places? Is Carpenter currently unsafe and unhealthy, Mr. Heyde?
Meanwhile, D-64 Supt. Philip Bender is claiming the decision to install AC and a new boiler at Carpenter is “going to require thought and input from the general public.”
We expect the initial “thought and input” on things like A/C and a new boiler for Carpenter to be coming from Bender and the D-64 Board, because he’s the one sitting in the big chair making the big bucks to provide that thought and input; and the seven School Board members were put in their seats to do something more than just rubber-stamp regular raises for the teachers’ union and their flavor-of-the-month educational programs which don’t seem to be raising the educational performance of the District’s students measurably.
Let those folks come up with two or three alternative plans for Carpenter, and then the taxpayers can provide their input – preferably first at public hearings, then at the voting booth in the form of a binding or advisory referendum.
And just in case the point hasn’t been sufficiently made by now: Crossing one’s fingers and hoping for a windfall of federal grant money is not a “plan.”
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