In two posts back in November and December we had some choice words for some of our elected representatives on the Park Ridge-Niles District 64 School Board who were looking down their noses at the idea of checking into whether all kids attending D-64 schools – and getting $14,000/year per kid educations for free, courtesy of Park Ridge taxpayers – actually resided in the District.

So we felt pleased and somewhat vindicated to read yesterday’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate article reporting that this past Monday (Feb. 9) night the D-64 Board voted to conduct residency checks for all students enrolled for the 2015-16 school year (“District 64 Board approves annual residency checks,” Feb. 10).

And we have to give Supt. Laurie Heinz props for coming up with three options for the residency checks: Option A, with checks every three years; Option B, with families checked every year via in-person presentation of residency documentation; and Option C, being the same as Option B but with residency documents simply being sent in.

While we prefer Option B, any of the three would be better than the Swiss-cheese residency check system that’s currently in place and that actually might be allowing people who owned a home in Park Ridge five or even ten years ago to continue to send their kids to D-64 schools even if they sold that home and moved to Niles, Des Plaines, or Edison Park.

But nothing ever seems to be an unqualified “win,” much less a “win-win,” for either the students or the taxpayers at D-64.

So when Board member John Heyde and his coat-holding acolyte, Scott Zimmerman, once again objected to any residency checks as being “too burdensome” for residents, Heinz immediately scrambled for a “compromise” to mollify them. And consistent with the view that compromise produces a camel when what you really need is a thoroughbred, Heinz’s compromise was Option A (an every-three year check) but applied to only half of District families!

Seriously.

Fortunately, Board president Tony Borrelli and members Dan Collins, Bob Johnson, Dathan Paterno and Vicki Lee resisted getting sucked down that rabbit hole into Heyde’s and Zimm’s own special non-accountability wonderland; and that absurd compromise was defeated 5-2.

But it sounds as if the residency check for this coming school year will be a “trial” – with the expectation that if the first year’s check doesn’t disclose a significant enough number of scofflaws, the Board would cancel the residency checks for future years. What that “significant enough” number might be, however, apparently was not discussed by a Board and administration that historically treats concrete, measurable performance goals like plague-ridden rats.

Considering that each scofflaw student represents $14,000 of cost, however, just three or four scofflaws could cover the cost of one relatively “junior” D-64 teacher – assuming the Board and Administration don’t come up with ways to seriously dilute those savings by heavily padding the costs of conducting the checks.

The two most notable Board member comments on that issue, based on the H-A article, were from Collins and Paterno.

Collins, who has two children in District schools and who was the only Board member to vote against “free” (i.e., taxpayer-paid) Chromebooks, apparently went beyond his own personal opinion and made the effort to talk to District parents about the annual residency checks. And he reported – not surprisingly to us – that everyone he talked to thought annual checks were “a great idea.”

We’re betting he would have received an even more ringing endorsement from those District taxpayers without kids in D-64 schools who just pay the bills.

Paterno, on the other hand, reportedly dismissed the checks thusly: “We should at least do it once, and if we don’t catch anybody, we’d know it was a waste of time.” Kind of like the DEA raiding a suspected drug house once, finding no drugs, and never checking it again.

With that kind of attitude (reportedly joined in by Vicki Lee) combined with Heyde’s and Zimm’s outright opposition to residency checks, it sounds like a majority of the D-64 Board might be engineering the “trial” for failure and sabotaging it right from the get-go.

And, not surprisingly, according to the H-A article the Board didn’t even specify whether the District will use Option B or Option C.  That left filling that decision-making void to D-64 Public Information Coordinator (a/k/a, Propaganda Minister) Bernadette Tramm, who reportedly confirmed to Pioneer Press that the Board is leaving those kinds of details up to “the district administration.”

Big mistake, or bad idea?

Unless a few Board members grow spines pretty quickly and force the bureaucrats to put in place a transparent, clearly-understandable residency check process with specifically measurable goals, the one-year “trial” might very well be both.

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