Oops…they did it again.

A recent report in the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“District 207 administrators bank raises for new year,” August 15) confirms what we’ve all known for far too long: that the folks we elect to keep an eye on the bureaucrats we don’t elect, and on how those unelected bureaucrats spend our tax dollars, are themselves compulsive spenders.

So if you’re Maine Twp. High School District 207 Superintendent Kenneth Wallace or any other D-207 administrators and non-teaching staffers, you’ll be finding extra money in your pay envelope this coming year.  For Wallace, that means an extra $6,000 in salary – from $200,990 last year to $207,020 this year.

As H-A reporter Natasha Wasinski notes, Wallace now has had three straight years of 1% salary bumps, starting with a 1% increase in 2011, a 2% bump last year, and now a 3% hike.  And back in June, the D-207 Board gave him a $25,000 “performance annuity payment” – while also giving a 2% boost to D-207 support staff and a 1.5% boost to other administrators’ base salaries.

Why?

Chief D-207 propagandist Dave Beery tried to justify these increases by pointing out that administrative pay is based, in part, on performance.  Not surprisingly, however, Beery doesn’t explain what specific “performance” justified Wallace’s recent 3% pop, or his 1-2-3% three-year run (Anybody want to hazard a guess what percent next year’s raise will be?)  Or the “performance” that justified the $25,000 windfall.  Or the “performance” of all the other administrative and staff people.

Having studiously observed bureaucrats in the wild for the past 20 or so years, we’re willing to bet that whatever those “performance” standards might be, they are more about individual performance than student or district-wide performance.  Otherwise, Beery would be proclaiming District 207 achievements from the rooftops: “D-207 student achievement up 5%!”  Or “ISATs up in all 3 D-207 schools!” Or, mirabile dictu: “Rankings up, costs down at Maine Twp. schools!”

We don’t recall reading any such headlines.  Do you?

Interestingly, the H-A story reports that D-207 salaries and benefits collectively increased less than the Consumer Price Index increase of 2.5%, as if the CPI is even a rational benchmark for compensation increases.  Why is any public-sector employee compensation ever tied to the CPI – not only is it bad employment policy, but it’s an inflationary and divisive economic policy that actually rewards those public employees with COLAs for increases in the inflation to which their salary increases contribute, via the increasing number of tax dollars paid by private-sector employees who don’t get COLAs.

Not that the D-207 Board (or the D-64 Board, for that matter) cares about such things.

It also makes us wonder whether the raises would have jumped to 5% or even 10% if the CPI made similar leaps – because it seems like both the D-207 Board and the D-64 Board believe the taxpayers should be required to protect school employees from the adverse effects of inflation by giving them raises, irrespective of whether or not they actually perform their jobs better and more cost-effectively, or the performance of the schools and their students measurably improve.

In other words, fellow taxpayers, we get to insure our School District employees’ buying power, even though darn few of us have any similar kind of insurance in our own jobs.  Or tenure that virtually guarantees lifetime employment.  Or constitutionally-guaranteed pensions running up to 75% of our last salary when we retire from public employment…as early as age 55 or so.

No wonder the State is going bankrupt.

Nevertheless, we have to confess to almost feeling bad about hammering Wallace for his raises, however, seeing as he’s making almost $20,000 LESS than the drunken sailors on the D-64 Board are paying Wallace’s counterpart, Superintendent Philip Bender – despite Wallace’s overseeing an Illinois Top 20 high school district with a budget of $147 million, while Bender oversees a Top 100 (?) elementary school district with a budget about half D-207’s.

According to the H-A story, only new Board member Mary Childers voiced any concern about these raises on behalf of the taxpayers, although she apparently couldn’t quite bring herself to break from the rest of the bobble-heads who rubber-stamped those raises.

We know it’s tough being the only adult in a room full of children, Mary, especially when you aren’t drinking the Kool-Aid.

But it’s time to start just saying “no” to dopes.

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