If you don’t recognize the name Bernadette Tramm, don’t feel bad.  The “Public Information Coordinator” of Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 probably likes it that way.

She’s the District 64 employee whose job it is to burnish the public image of District 64 – to ensure that good news about the District gets shouted from the rooftops while bad news gets buried.  Quickly.  No matter how little useful information might be flowing out of D-64’s headquarters, it’s Ms. Tramm’s job to convince the average citizen that the sunlight on D-64 is so bright it’s time to put on the Oakleys…and slather on a little SPF-30 for good measure.

When D-64 wins the virtually meaningless “Big Red Apple” award every year, it’s Tramm’s job to make sure every local news organization knows about it the moment it’s announced.  And when the Chicago Sun-Times reports (as it did in its May 31, 2011 edition) that D-64 has the 4th highest paid administrators and the 25th highest paid teachers, it’s also Tramm’s job to convince those same local news outlets not to sully their pages with such matters.

So Tramm must have been working overtime this past week to spin the Chicago Tribune’s “TribLocal” reporter, Jennifer Delgado, into writing not one but two stories that were printed in yesterday’s edition.

The first, “D64 looks at new ways to communicate with taxpayers,” is a puff-piece on D-64’s purported embrace of increased communication and transparency “with parents, community members and taxpayers” – including improvements to the District’s website, the use of social media, and online surveys.  Delgado writes approvingly of how, just this past August, “the district started taping board meetings in response to parents [sic] complaints” – without mentioning that the District’s taping commenced only after resident Marshall Warren showed up with his own video camera and recorded the August 8th meeting.

Delgado also fails to mention that, prior to Warren’s self-help cinematography, Supt. Philip Bender was resisting video-recording of meetings and calling for an opinion from the District’s legal counsel, while Board member Scott Zimmerman proclaimed the videotaping of meetings as being “against school board policy.”  Why the oversight by Delgado?  We’re guessing she didn’t dig outside the little area Tramm had plowed for her – which means that including such information, as President Bush ’41 used to say: “Wouldn’t be prudent.”

Prudence also may be why Tramm bemoaned the expense of the community-wide telephone survey suggested by Board member Anthony Borrelli, and why a proposed District “blog” will likely contain only “one or two paragraphs or photos of school happenings” and won’t “be geared for commentary.”  In other words, D-64 doesn’t want any comments it can’t sanitize and control.

And prudence may also be why we can’t seem to find anywhere on the D-64 website the exact amount of extra dollars – not just the 44 cents added to the levy in 2006 and 2007, or some unidentifiable percentage – that the referendum tax increase took out of the taxpayers’ pockets; or why nobody at D-64 seems to be able to satisfactorily explain why its schools don’t consistently score as well on the ISATs as many suburban districts whose administrators and teachers aren’t nearly as well paid.

That’s what passes for communication and transparency from D-64.

Delgado’s second article “D64 moves quickly to bring finance committee back,” reports on D-64’s intention to quickly reconvene its Community Finance Committee (“CFC”) and recruit new members “to study subjects like spend management, student fees and taxpayer education.”

Anytime you hear the term “taxpayer education,” think “propaganda.”  And when it comes from D-64, that propaganda likely is coming from Tramm.

The CFC, you may recall, was created in 2004 in order to address the death-spiral the District’s finances were in the years following the 1997 “Yes/Yes” referendum to replace the District’s then-newest school building with the “new” Emerson Middle School.  The CFC’s innovative response to that problem was to: (a) recommend a “backdoor” non-voting referendum that authorized the issuance of $5 million of working-cash bonds to keep the Illinois State Board of Education from taking charge of the District’s finances; and then (b) recommend the 2007 tax increase referendum.

Can you say “tax, borrow and spend?”  Or “borrow, tax and spend?” Or how about “Spend, borrow and tax?”  Did you know that’s what passes for financial strategy at D-64?

Which is why Delgado’s reporting that a CFC “subgroup” had advised the D-64 administration and Board that “the district’s fund balance would reach an apex after the referendum but then would gradually decrease, meaning the district might have to seek another referendum” made us more than a little suspicious – if only because we can’t tell from Delgado’s article whether the subgroup’s advice to which she refers occurred back in 2007, or is of more recent vintage.

When the District pushed through the 2007 tax increase referendum, it did so with the promise that the revenues produced by the tax increase, combined with the District’s more frugal management, would put off any future tax increase referendum to 2017.  At this point in time, however, we are skeptical about that promise becoming reality because we see no hard evidence that D-64’s management has been frugal…even before Board members John Heyde and Pat Fioretto start negotiating the new teachers union contract.

Which means that the CFC subgroup’s prediction may very well come true…and sooner than 2017.

And when that time comes, expect Ms. Tramm to do her best to spin that bit of dross into pure gold.

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