In our 12.31.15 post we warned about the new teachers contract that would be devised by Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 and the Park Ridge Education Association (“PREA”), a mis-match on the order of Muhammed Ali v. Zora Folley.
And in case you don’t grasp the metaphor, the PREA is Ali.
One of the big differences between Ali–Folley and PREA–D-64 is that, while the former bout was held before a jam-packed Madison Square Garden, the latter is being staged in the secrecy of closed-session meetings – the legacy of the 2012 contract offered by then-D-64 Board president John Heyde and sidekick Pat Fioretto as just another favor to a PREA that most definitely doesn’t ever want D-64 taxpayers hearing either the teachers’ demands or their responses to any D-64 counters, however insipid the latter might be.
So while this year’s “negotiations” – if you can legitimately use that term for ankle-grabbing on command – have been going on for weeks (months?), taxpayers have been kept in such darkness by the D-64 (a/k/a, the D-64 taxpayers’) “negotiating” team that we don’t even know what round it is. And we most likely won’t know a thing until (mixing metaphors) the white smoke emerges from the D-64 chimney and the respective sides’ sycophants and/or spinmeisters begin chanting “Habemus contracta!”
If past is prologue, the taxpayers won’t even see that contract until after it is ratified by PREA membership and approved by the D-64 Board. Four years ago, the new contract didn’t appear on the D-64 website until months after it was appproved, after it was posted on the PREA website.
One easy way to tell if the “fix” was in (returning to the boxing metaphor), however, is to see whether the D-64 team of Supt. Laurie Heinz, Board pres. Tony Borrelli and Board v.p. Scott Zimmerman chose to bake yet another secret negotiations provision into the new contract in order to ensure yet another Star Chamber negotiation for the next contract.
We’re betting “Yes!” Actually, we’re betting “Hell yes!”
Once you find that secrecy provision in the new contract you can also bet there is a new set of those “step” (seniority-based) and “lane” (continuing education-based) increases unrelated to any actual merit. That’s because seniority and continuing education, however irrelevant and ineffective in producing improved student performance and achievement, are what’s important to the PREA and to the D-64 Board. Which means the D-64 team happily threw in the towel on that part of the contract, too.
Keeping teacher (and administrator) compensation disconnected to merit and achievement appears to be one of the main reasons why D-64 maintains total radio silence about those inconvenient truths: (a) its students’ test scores don’t measure up to comparable districts; (b) its schools’ rankings are inferior to the schools of those other districts; and (c) its educational mediocrity may be adversely impacting Maine South’s performance. Ignoring those truths reduces the chances of D-64’s having to explain them to the folks paying for the underachievement.
Meanwhile, the only report we’ve heard about the “negotiations” appeared in an article about the D-64 budget in last week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Budget discussion continues in District 64,” June 14), in which Board president Borrelli stated that the parties are “currently working on salaries in negotiation.”
Translation: They are currently working on how much more the teachers will be paid for no greater effort or objectively-measurable results.
Interestingly enough, the focus of that H-A article was how the District is stripping $10 million out of its working cash fund so that it can pay cash for upcoming capital projects instead of going to referendum – and thereby giving the taxpayers a voice in whether and/or which such capital projects should be done. Avoiding actual taxpayer votes on taxing and spending is a D-64 tradition since at least 1997, when D-64 was forced into the “Yes/Yes” referendum to build the new Emerson Middle School and increase the operating levy – only to discover a few years later that it apparently had failed to adequately budget for Emerson’s debt service and operations.
The result: by 2003 the District was annually popping up on the Illinois State Board of Education’s financial “early warning” or “financial watch” lists – a highly-problematic situation that the District downplayed while sneakily issuing $5 million of back-door “working cash bonds” to replenish its diminished fund balances in 2005 until it could crank up its propaganda machine to promote the multi-million dollar “Citizens For Strong Schools” referendum in 2007.
Based on D-64’s “2015-2016 Tentative Fund Balance June 30, 2016” that stripped out $10 million of working cash will reduce the District’s projected working cash balance by 66%, and leave the overall fund balance at $40,537,045 – giving the District a cushion of approximately 57% of its annual operating expenses, still well above its professed objective of “33% (4 months (120 days) of operating expense).”
So if the District’s professed objective is 33% of operating expenses, what’s the reason for it hanging onto an overall fund balance which, even after taking that $10 million working cash fund hit, will still be 73% above that objective?
Can you say “Slush fund”? We knew you could.
Now, can you say “Produced by year after year of maximum tax levies”? Well done!
Sitting on such a huge pile of extra cash (which the taxpayers otherwise would have in their own pockets, bank accounts or investment accounts) makes it so much easier for the D-64 Board and administrators to spend big chunks of it without having to get taxpayer approval via referendum. And those big chunks can be spent without the taxpayers really even noticing that it’s being spent, and what they’re getting in return for that spending.
As the old saying goes: “A slice off a cut loaf is rarely missed.” Or, in D-64’s case, a lot of slices. And that’s just another way that D-64 remains non-transparent and un-accountable to those taxpayers.
Now, bring on the next Star Chamber discussion of another Heinz contract extension and raise!
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8 comments so far
Two years ago Colorado voted by a 70% margin to require teacher contract negotiations to be open to the media and the public. The law was sponsored by a local free-market think tank arguing that taxpayers should know the details of labor union negotiations because most of the money schools spend are to pay teachers.
“Secrecy is the enemy of good government,” said the leader of the group supporting the new law initiative.
And because school boards and teacher unions must be pretty much the same dishonest people everywhere, the ones in Colorado opposed the initiative. I’m sure that would be the same here with Borrelli, Zimmerman, Heinz, and the PREA honchos with their love of secrecy.
EDITOR’S NOTE: D-64 school board members should know that the only way their constituents, the taxpayers, will understand the dynamics of teacher contract negotiations is to put that process on display for all to see. Those school board members also know, however, that while doing so will expose the unions’ shameless demands, it will also expose the School Board’s spinelessness in responding to those demands.
And when the taxpayers can read the respective proposals, and watch and listen to the negotiations, they can decide for themselves who deserves what and why instead of relying on propaganda from the D-64 or PREA spinmeisters. That’s terrifying to a Board and administration that are so hostile to transparency that they willingly agree to contractual provisions locking the taxpayers out of the room where the confiscation of those taxpayers’ funds is being decided.
Do you anticipate that the property tax increase for D64 will be at the maximum or does this ‘slush’ fund ease the tax burden at all?
EDITOR’S NOTE: D-64 ALWAYS levies the max, on the ridiculous “use it or lose it” theory that infects many/most non-home rule governmental units.
Apparently you don’t get the fact that this slush fund has been built with the money you and your fellow taxpayers already have pre-paid through years of prior D-64 tax increases. So they’ve already got your wallet – interest free. Better check to see whether they lifted your watch, too.
Louis Brandeis said: “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”
By that standard, the D64/PREA secret negotiations are the cause of social and industrial diseases, lacking both disinfectants and policing.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Why limit it to just the “secret negotiations” when Borrelli’s D-64 Board does so much more in secret?
So you want the District’s negotiating team to reveal their strategy to the PREA and let it get picked apart so that we end up paying even more in taxes to cover teacher salaries? Great idea, genius!
EDITOR’S NOTE: We have explained how public-sector “negotiations” should work in our post of 05.23.11 (and reiterated in posts on 02.27.12 and 06.14.13):
Given that the wages and benefits paid our public employees, including our unionized ones, involve the public purse about which there should be no secrets, however, there’s no good reason why such collective bargaining shouldn’t be held in meetings open to the press and the public.
Let the City decide, as part of its very public budget process, what wage and benefit terms are affordable and in the best interest of the taxpayers for the coming year, and only for the coming year. The City should then publicly offer those exact terms to the union representing the particular bargaining unit; and then let that union make its case, equally publicly, to those same taxpayers if it thinks its members deserve more than what the City offered. Maybe all this could be done as part of the budget process.
I don’t necessarily have an issue with increases for increased education on the part of teachers, if the classes they’ve taken directly relate to what they are teaching, but I do wonder if that’s the case.
Since teachers receive increases each year automatically just for showing up, why then is it necessary to increase salaries beyond that? Pick one or the other.
And all the bennies to boot, like 15 sick days a year for a 9 month job plus personal days, pensions, etc., pretty sweet deal.
The only “report” regarding negotiations at the school board meetings is something along the lines of “we’ve covered items 1 and 2 and are working on 7 and 8” which tells the public absolutely nothing. Not sure why Borrelli wastes time and breath even making the statement.
And yes, there’s no doubt in my mind that the evaluation of Supt. Heinz will be another closed session. Heaven forbid the taxpayers should know anything.
Baaaah!
EDITOR’S NOTE: Based on an article in the current issue of The Economist (http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21700383-what-matters-schools-teachers-fortunately-teaching-can-be-taught-how-make-good) and similar articles published over the past decade, continuing teacher training might be worthwhile. But we don’t believe that’s the only “increased education” credit that provides “lane” salary increases.
Borrelli “wastes time and breath” because then he can claim at least some plausible deniability in response to criticism of all his secretive closed sessions. Plus that’s also likely to be what Supt. Heinz and propaganda minister Bernadette Tramm are telling him to do, so he’s just following orders.
Is that “Baaaah!” as in the preface to “humbug,” or the sound that the sheep on the D-64 Board make?
I love your idea of the unions having to prove why they deserve the extra money they want, and then say whether some other expense should be cut or taxes should be raised.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Unfortunately, that’s what the public-employee unions DON’T want – and we don’t have enough leaders among our elected officials to stand up to them.
If the D64 board has a “strategy” with regard to their negotiating with the PREA, good for them. I think we’ll never know for sure.
What I do not understand is why the PREA feels it necessary to keep their demands secret and why the D64 board would agree to that. Could it be because PREA is embarrassed to be asking for yet more from the already overburdened taxpayers?
Or did the D64 board agree to secrecy so that the taxpayers would have no idea of just how well or how poorly the D64 board represented the taxpayers in the negotiations? If we don’t know what the PREA was demanding, we have no way to judge whether the crack negotiating team did their jobs or was just blowing smoke.
Look for the D64 board members to be sporting plaster casts for their arms broken patting themselves on the back. And the PREA snickering all the way to the bank.
EDITOR’S NOTE: You’re right about this D-64 Board and Administration wanting to hide their ineptitude and general fecklessness in closed sessions. But they don’t even have a “strategery” for negotiating with the PREA – unless it starts with “Bend over and grab your ankles….”
Don’t for even a second think that the PREA, or any other public sector union, is ever “embarrassed” by its demands. It’s just that they’re afraid to let those “already overburdened taxpayers” know how unjustified those demands are, and how intractable the PREA is in fighting for those demands. If a clear picture, live or videotape with sound, got out, all their “for the kids” rhetoric would be revealed for the self-serving nonsense it is.
And when this exercise in Star Chamber-like deception is finished, Borrelli and Heinz will gush about how tough they were and what a great job they did in getting the best deal possible for the taxpayers that’s also fair to the teachers. Right before Borrelli herds his sheep into yet another closed session to decide on giving Heinz another year’s contract extension and more money.
I hear what you’re saying and I agree that these secret negotiations are suspicious and bad. But what can an ordinary citizen like me do about it?
EDITOR’S NOTE: Start with: Going to D-64 Board meetings and raising hell with Borrelli and his Star Chamber government; voting out the anti-transparency stooges; and treating transparency and accountability as a litmus test for every candidate for local office.
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