A couple of weeks ago we published our 02.07.14 post about new Park Ridge-Niles School District 64’s new superintendent, Laurie Heinz and the closed-session process by which the D-64 Board decided on the salary and benefits offered her.

We questioned how and why Heinz, being given her first crack at a superintendent position, should be paid as much as her predecessor, a veteran superintendent with four years of service here and a number of additional years in the a similar position in Indiana.  Not that she shouldn’t be paid that much, mind you, but we thought the taxpayers should know why and how that deal was actually determined.

Of course, that process is and likely will remain a mystery, because the D-64 Board didn’t want to disclose any of the factors or what passed for “reasoning”  during its deliberations.  Giving away large sums of tax dollars, especially in wages that dwarf the median Park Ridge household income, is not the kind of thing that those Board members want scrutinized by pesky taxpayers.

But the $201,000 salary (total compensation: $243,010) that Heinz will be paid as the District’s big cheese almost seems like a bargain compared to the Board’s recent decision to give business manager Rebecca Allard a contract extension for the 2014-15 school year and pay her a whopping $212,063 – which purportedly represents “an increase of two percent (2%) in the Administrator’s creditable earnings reportable to the Teacher’s Retirement System over her compensation package for the 2013-14 school year,” according to a copy of her June 28, 2014 Administrator’s Employment Contract that someone anonymously flung over our transom.

Oh, and part of the extension deal, according to the contract language, is that Allard tendered her “irrevocable notice of intent to resign for retirement purposes on June 30, 2015.”  Which means that extra bump could be felt in multiple amounts by Illinois taxpayers for another 20-30 years in the form of higher constitutionally-guaranteed pension benefits Allard can collect.

Although Allard’s deal was formally approved at the Board’s January 28, 2014, meeting, the details appear to have been worked out in typical D-64 secrecy during…wait for it…a 2-hour plus closed session on January 14.  So the taxpayers have no ability to see or hear whatever wisdom or absurdity went into shaping those contract terms.

District taxpayers will also hand Allard an additional $3,500 for “Personal Growth,” and may toss her an extra $2,500 “Merit Award” at the superintendent’s discretion.  Throw in $1,100 for cell phone expense and some car mileage money and Allard’s entire final-year package totals up to a nifty $219,163.

And that extraordinary sum also includes more than nine – NINE! – weeks of “vacation”: a month of paid vacation, 12 “legal school holidays,” and the potential for another three weeks of Xmas break and Spring break, should her services not “be required by the Superintendent” during those break periods.

That’s almost $70,000 more than the City of Park Ridge pays its rookie city manager, and almost as much as the City paid its previous veteran city manager – under a boneheaded contract awarded, over Mayor Dave Schmidt’s veto, by then-alds. Rich DiPietro, Don Bach, Jim Allegretti, Robert Ryan, Tom Carey, Frank Wsol and current Ald. Joe Sweeney, only a few months before all but DiPietro and Sweeney left the Council without even attempting to run for re-election.

Call it a fond parting gift to City taxpayers that kept on giving long after the boneheads departed.

Allard’s $212,000 base salary alone puts her well into the notorious “Top 5%” category of this country’s “rich” people which starts, based on the latest IRS figures, at around $168,000.  And according to the data we’ve reviewed from a variety of sources – Illinois doesn’t make it easy for the taxpayers to find such information in any one place, and different databases seem to have conflicting information – Allard might be able to collect around $150,000 a year in pension benefits, which will keep her within hailing distance of that “Top 5%” category into retirement.

Not half bad for government work – especially for someone who more than earned her share of the criticism we doled out in our 06.12.09, 03.17.11, 05.13.11, 07.22.13 and 01.21.14 posts.

Not surprisingly, we couldn’t find a D-64 press release hailing Allard’s contract from D-64’s minister of propaganda, Bernadette Tramm.  As Pres. George H.W. Bush used to say: “Wouldn’t be prudent” – especially having been concocted around the same time as the D-64 Board was secretly cooking up its sweet deal for Laurie Heinz.

And that, dear readers, is just more business-as-usual at D-64, where delivering measurable quality education seems to rank a distant second behind paying teachers and administrators handsomely, both while working and in retirement.

Compliments of, as always, OPM.

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