At its November 14 meeting, the Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 Board proposed a 4.73% overall increase (4.99% increase on those “capped” funds) in next year’s property tax levy over this current year’s levy, pushing its property tax request up to $62,306,681.  That levy will be the subject of a public hearing at the meeting on December 12, and is expected to be approved by the Board at its December 19 meeting.

That’s the Christmas gift the Board will be giving itself at the expense of us taxpayers, presumably so that it can give a belated Christmas gift – a new contract – to the teachers union sometime next year.   

Want to know how Board president John Heyde rationalizes this increase?

“No one expects we’ll actually receive that.” 

Which may be true because, thanks to the tax caps, D-64 is likely to get no bigger an increase than the rate of inflation, plus whatever additional taxes can be assessed on whatever “new construction” has become taxable in 2011.  That’s got District Business Manager Rebecca Allard predicting an overall 1.5% increase, plus that new-construction differential.

In fairness to the folks running D-64, the property tax process in Crook County is arcane at best.   But that doesn’t excuse the kind of shameless spending that has characterized D-64 for more than a decade – ever since it decided in 1997 to demolish its newest school building to make way for a newer $20 million Emerson Middle School that has never produced $20 million of educational quality, at least as measured by the ISAT scores that are commonly used to compare interscholastic educational quality.   

As can be seen from the District 64 tax collection history for the period 2000 to the present, the 2007 tax increase referendum gave D-64 an $8 million tax bump for the 2006 tax year, and another $7 million bump for the 2007 tax year.  But that $15 million wasn’t just two years of extra cash infusions to fill a hole created over the 10 previous years, as the District officials (and their “Citizens for Strong Schools” propaganda arm) sold it to the voters. 

Instead, that $15 million bump created a new tax “floor” for the future tax increases that have followed since then, which have helped enable D-64 to crank its budget up to a projected $70 million for the upcoming fiscal year.  Which might also help explain the 4th highest paid administrators and the 25th highest paid teachers in the State of Illinois – according to an article printed by the Chicago Sun-Times back in May.

D-64 spends almost $20 million more each year to educate 4,300 children than the City of Park Ridge spends to run an entire community of 37,000+ people.   And the City, despite cutting the multi-million dollar deficits it had been posting in recent years, could definitely operate a whole lot more cost effectively.

So what does that say about D-64?

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