The word came “over the transom” just a few minutes ago: Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District 64 and the Park Ridge Education Association (“PREA”) have a deal!

The official announcement reportedly is due out later today, although we wonder whether it will contain detailed terms or, instead, keep them under wraps for another week or so in order to reduce the time the taxpayers have to mobilize opposition before the contract is ratified by the PREA membership and then approved, along with the District’s new budget, at the next Board meeting on September 24th at Franklin School. 

Having observed the way D-64 and the PREA traditionally announce their contracts, we can expect the standard love fest between/among the respective negotiators, highlighted by rounds of mutual self-gratification masquerading as adulation. 

Expect D-64 School Board president John Heyde to praise the PREA negotiators for their hard-but-reasonable bargaining on behalf of all the Districts wonderful teachers, while the PREA leadership reciprocates with kudos to the D-64 negotiators for their hard-but-reasonable bargaining on behalf of the District’s taxpayers.  Both sides, naturally, will pay the necessary lip service to their boundless concern for the well-being of the D-64 students, presumably punctuated with at least one or two invocations of the “it’s for the kids” cliché.

Although we have neither seen nor heard the details of whatever agreement these merry co-conspirators have cooked up, there are a few easy ways to determine whether the taxpayers have been sold out by the seven School Board members who are supposed to be looking out for our interests: John Heyde, Scott Zimmerman, Sharon Lawson, Eric Uhlig, Pat Fioretto, Dan Collins and Tony Borrelli.

The first is the length of the contract. 

Anything over 2 years is a “teachers” contract because it is designed to lock in teacher-favorable terms no matter how bad the economy gets.  Judging by most polls, surveys, and the predictions of many of this country’s prominent economists, a big recovery is not even on the horizon.  And anybody who thinks that a Mike Madigan-controlled General Assembly is going to pull Illinois out of its glide path toward figurative, if not literal, bankruptcy is snorting bath salts.

The second clue to a Board sell-out is whether the new contract retains a “negotiations-are-secret” provision.

That’s the kind of provision in the just-expired contract that kept these negotiations under the public’s radar.  Public employee unions – especially those who claim to be doing the angels’ work, like police, fire and teachers – don’t want the gullible public finding out about any of their demands that might be viewed as unreasonable or greedy, much less watching and listening to those demands and counter-demands in real time.  If the new contract has that same secrecy provision in it, we’ll know we’ve been had. 

The third clue will be whether the Board will actually provide a detailed post-mortem account of the various “bid” and “ask” terms of the negotiations.

Keeping secret the information such as PREA’s initial wage demand and the District’s initial wage offer, followed by the counter-asks and counter-bids, is essential to D-64 and the PREA manipulating public opinion.  That kind of play-by-play account of the negotiations is frowned upon by both sides because that would reveal too much about the less-than-angelic bargaining strategies of the “angels,” and the windsock-like resoluteness of our tough-as-mashed-potatoes School Board negotiators.

But where the rubber always meets the road is how much the raises will be.  And, rest assured, there will be raises.

We’ll know the Board has sold us taxpayers down the river if they describe the raises in terms of: “X % in Year 1, Y% in Year 2, etc.”  That’s because those announced percentages almost always refer only to “base” salary increases, not to the additional components of teacher compensation known as “step” and “lane” increases that drive up the price of poker without public recognition.

For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, or who have been suckered by the D-64/PREA wind-talking all these years, “step-and-lane” are the pre-programmed, scheduled annual increases that have been built into recent contracts to ensure routine annual raises for employees simply for seniority (“step”) and/or for accumulating credits toward an advanced academic degree (“lane”). 

D-64 teachers, administrators and Board members don’t like to talk about those increases, which we understand have been averaging 2% over the past several years.  For example, if the new D-64/PREA contract provides for a Year 1 base salary increase of, say, 2%, after figuring in the step and lane increases the average teacher will actually be getting a 4%+ increase – to go along with the 8-9 month work year and those outstanding benefits such as tenure, health care, minimal-to-non-existent performance standards, and the still-guaranteed defined-benefit pensions with their cost-of-living adjustment that actually rewards retirees for the otherwise dubious condition called “inflation.”

Should just the base salary increase be reported, that will be a clear indication that Heyde and Company believe the teachers deserve to remain at least the 25th best-compensated elementary school teachers in the state, notwithstanding that the measurable educational performance of their students is not within hailing distance of a 25th-in-state ranking.

And it will be a clear indication we’ve been sold out by the School Board.  Again.

UPDATE:   Looks like we guessed right on the 2% raise.  Assuming we can trust whatever they are saying – and when it comes to D-64, we subscribe to the motto of the late and lamented Chicago City News Bureau: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” – the annual increase will average 3.6% guaranteed for the next four years. 

How many Park Ridge working folks (yeah, you folks with the jobs that require you to work a full 11 months or more, not 8 or 9) are guaranteed a 3.6% pay increase for the next four years?  Heck, how many of you are even guaranteed a job for the next four years?

We particularly like the quotes in the H-A article from PREA and D-64.

PREA President Erin Breen: “This agreement is a win for all stakeholders in the Park Ridge-Niles community.”

Any time a taxpayer hears the word “stakeholders,” he/she can be sure that somebody in government is grabbing for his/her wallet.

Board President John Heyde: “This longer agreement offers the Board and our teachers a stable foundation for planning while focusing on improvements in teaching and student learning.”

A “stable foundation” for planning what, John…how students can continue to underperform while the teachers remain the 25th highest paid in the state and the administrators remain the 4th highest paid? 

Not surprisingly, D-64 isn’t giving its taxpayers the courtesy of posting the draft contract because [insert explanation of your choice here], but they have posted a “Fact Sheet” containing what we can only assume are the minimum number of “safe” facts they think they can get away with posting in order to claim they are being “transparent.” 

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