I was all set to praise the District 150 school board for being open-minded about the two-school option in the East Bluff/North Valley area, and reconsidering their plans to remodel the district offices… and then I read this:

District 150’s newly named deputy superintendents will receive temporary pay raises until Superintendent Ken Hinton recovers from back surgery and returns to work.

The School Board approved 15 percent raises for deputy superintendents Cindy Fischer and Herschel Hannah. Their pay will return to normal when Hinton comes back.

What is the matter with these people? Let’s review. Royster is fired. Board wants Hinton to replace her, but Hinton doesn’t have certification to be a superintendent. They hire him anyway (as “deputy” superintendent) and hire Fischer and Hannah as co-interim superintendents. Then Hinton gets his certification and becomes Superintendent.

Then the board decides to keep Fischer and Hannah on anyway, even though these positions are unnecessary now because the Superintendent position is filled. They call them “Associate Superintendents” and gave them a huge pay increase just a few months ago.

Now that Hinton is out on medical leave, they give them both another huge pay increase (albeit “temporary”) while he’s out of the office. These two superfluous positions already pay over $114,000 a year before the increase. Fifteen percent of that is over $17,000 (annually).

I can find no other school district the size of District 150 that has as many superintendents as District 150. This is the district that is always complaining about not having money, using the Chamber of Commerce to get donations to keep the truancy center open, considering outsourcing the lunch ladies, negotiating low or no raises for teachers, etc., etc. Yet they can spend gobs of money on superfluous administrative positions and give them mammoth raises without batting an eye.

Priorities?

UPDATE: Some of the following information has been disputed. Please see this follow-up post.

District 150 has been holding community forums to get input from citizens on where they would like a new school located in the East Bluff/North Valley area. At each forum, citizens have been told that the Illinois State Board of Education requires that the Kingman, Irving, and Glen Oak school buildings be replaced. For instance, one of the slides in their presentation is titled, “Buildings to be replaced per State.”

I’ve learned not to trust the school board when they tell me something is required by the state. Not long ago, Superintendent Hinton went on the radio and said the state required any new school to be built on 15 acres or more. It turned out that wasn’t true.

So I wasn’t surprised when I discovered that the state actually does not require that the buildings be replaced. I spoke to Lou Ferratier in the Illinois State Board of Education’s School Business and Support Services division. He said the buildings need to be either repaired or replaced, but the state does not require replacement. This is clear even from reading the applicable section of the state’s School Code (105 ILCS 5/17?2.11):

For purposes of this Section a school district may [emphasis mine] replace a school building or build additions to replace portions of a building when it is determined that the effectuation of the recommendations for the existing building will cost more than the replacement costs. Such determination shall be based on a comparison of estimated costs made by an architect or engineer licensed in the State of Illinois. The new building or addition shall be equivalent in area (square feet) and comparable in purpose and grades served and may be on the same site or another site.

Here’s how much the state has approved for District 150 to expend in fire prevention and safety funds (acquired from District 150 via FOIA request):

The school can use that money to fix up the schools or replace the schools. They can build several smaller schools or one big school. The only requirements are:

1. Their buildings are brought up to code regardless of whether it’s through repair or replacement,
2. The replacement school(s) be used for the same purpose (elementary school), and
3. The replacement school(s) have equivalent aggregate square footage.

Here’s the deal: the reason the school district says they need to replace the school buildings is because, according to their last “Health Life Safety” report completed by STS Consultants, it would cost more money to repair the buildings than to replace them. However, that’s based on their reported replacement costs, which are obviously too low.

For example, the reported cost to replace Harrison School was about $11.8 million. But the school district asked for $21 million from the Public Building Commission to build a replacement Harrison. Cost to renovate? $11.98 million. That’s a $9.02 million difference. Yet somehow, replacing is supposed to be cheaper than renovating.

District 150 is trying to use the state as a scapegoat to deflect criticism of the school board’s decision to replace buildings that aren’t required to be replaced.

Clare Jellick has written on her blog what we all knew, but that the school board wouldn’t admit before now — that the district has money to build two new schools, one on the East Bluff and one in the North Valley. They just don’t want to build two schools:

At the end of Thursday’s forum, I approached School Board president David Gorenz to talk about the available funding. He recognized that the [$40 million worth of] PBC money is out there but said the district wants to use it for “other projects throughout the district.”

And of course, since the money they get from the Public Building Commission (PBC) is available without a referendum, there’s no accountability to the taxpayers on how it’s spent. (You can thank Aaron Schock for pushing through the bill that made it possible.)

So what are these “other projects throughout the district” on which they want to spend the PBC money? Well, of the $28 million of PBC funds they’ve already requested, $21 million is for the Harrison replacement school. According to a Sept. 29 Journal Star article:

$5.2 million in PBC bonding authority will be used to update the former Social Security Administration building at 2628 N. Knoxville Ave. It will house a program for at-risk youths.

The district’s Central Office, 3202 N. Wisconsin Ave., will be renovated with $1.8 million from the PBC. [emphasis mine]

So, $1.8 million for the district’s office building. Remember that. Let’s go back to Clare’s blog for a second and look at something District Treasurer Guy Cahill has said:

The district is planning one large school at 120,000 square feet that would cost between $20 and $21 million. Two smaller schools would add at least $1.2 million to that construction budget [emphasis mine], district treasurer Guy Cahill has said.

Setting aside for a moment the folly of acquiring another building that needs over $5 million in renovation when the district already has plenty of buildings — including the old Blaine-Sumner school they recently renovated for more office space — and in fact are supposedly trying to get rid of buildings, let’s just look at their office building rehab plans. I think it’s safe to conclude that the district feels it’s more important to spend $1.8 million to fix up their office building than spend $1.2 million to build two smaller schools, which is what the parents and teachers want, what their own Master Facilities Plan called for, and which has been proven to improve student achievement.

So much for interim Associate Deputy Superintendent Fischer’s statement at the last community forum that “our students deserve the very best.” I guess they only deserve the very best of what’s left over after our administrators get their offices renovated and redecorated.

At the third of four District 150 forums last night, over two-thirds of those in attendance expressed their preference for smaller, neighborhood schools.

About 44 people attended, including all the school board members and two city councilmen (Bob Manning and George Jacob).

Thirteen people in the audience spoke to the issue. Ten of those people, including three Kingman teachers, a Kingman parent, and several neighborhood activists stated they believed the district should not be building one “mega-school,” but that the East Bluff and North Valley should each have their own school, and that they should be neighborhood schools to which children and parents could walk.

The Kingman teachers pointed to data that achievement and test scores are better in smaller neighborhood schools than large consolidated schools. They also said that parental involvement is a large factor in educational success, and that without a neighborhood school, parental involvement would decline.

Steve Katlack, who has presented at each of the forums so far, pointed out to the board that their own Master Facilities Plan recommends building two schools, and asked why that had changed. The school board declined to answer.

At the end of the meeting, school board member Linda Butler thanked everyone for their comments, but added, “let’s not be divisive,” and asked that “more community spirit” be exhibited. I found that rather insulting of the audience, who were all there precisely because of their “community spirit,” and were only “be[ing] divisive” if that phrase is defined as “disagreeing with the school board.”

A couple of other quick notes about the evening:

• One of our two newly-christened “Deputy” Superintendents, Cindy Fischer, was there to explain Ken Hinton’s vision at the beginning of the evening.
• I talked to District Treasurer Guy Cahill after the meeting and asked him what will happen to the Health Life Safety (HLS) money the district has decided not to use for Harrison School (they’re going to use Public Building Commission money instead). He said it was his understanding that the HLS bonding authority is not tied to that particular project, but is given to the district in aggregate. So, it can be used for other schools that will be replaced instead.
• Cahill also explained that the HLS money is to replace an equal amount of square footage. So, for instance, say the total square footage of the four schools to be replaced is 320,000 (I don’t know what it really is, this is just a hypothetical number). The school district could build one 320,000-square-foot replacement school with HLS money or thirty-two 10,000-square-foot buildings. Those are two extreme examples, but the point is that the school district has flexibility regarding how many schools they choose to build.
• Three people spoke in favor of the Woodruff/Lincoln site for the new school building. Two of them own land near the site. One was a Chillicothe resident who owns a house near the site he stated he would be willing to sell to the school district. The other was developer Tim Tobin who stated he has a $2 million investment next to Woodruff.

District 150 has four superintendents. There’s Ken Hinton, of course, who got his certification after he was hired as superintendent. Then there are the two “associate superintendents” — Herschel Hannah and Cindy Fischer — who were hired to act as superintendents while Hinton was getting his certification; they were later retained permanently. And finally, there’s the “assistant superintendent,” Cheryl Sanfilip.

Hinton had surgery and has been out for months, working from home we’ve been assured. Until yesterday:

Associate superintendents Herschel Hannah and Cindy Fischer have been named “deputy superintendents,” according to a news release sent out Wednesday. The announcement came hours after the Journal Star began inquiring about Hinton’s status.

What I think is funny is that the district felt the need to give them a new title: “deputy” superintendent. I mean, they’re already Associate Superintendents, and they were in charge before Hinton got his certification. What’s with the new title all of a sudden?

Fortunately for the district [/sarcasm], they have as many superintendents as a baseball team has relief pitchers, so they’re more than adequately covered in the event that one or three of their superintendents are incapacitated.

The key to figuring out what District 150 is doing is to look at the Master Facilities Plan from October 11, 2005. That’s their playbook. Not that they haven’t deviated from it, but it’s still their preferred scenario. If they could have everything they wanted, it would look like the Master Facilities Plan.

Sticking to the Plan

So far, they’ve stuck pretty close to it. The first thing was to replace Harrison school. They’re in the process of that right now. They were originally going to use Health/Life Safety (HLS) bonds to pay for it, but they recently decided to go through the Public Building Commission instead. Apparently they’re not worried about losing that HLS money.

The next thing was to close and not replace White and Blaine-Sumner schools. Done. Although, while they stopped using Blaine-Sumner for a school, they’ve done some remodeling and now use it for offices, which means they didn’t actually save any money in facility expenses with that move.

Next was their plan to add seventh and eighth grade classes to Manual High School. I don’t know if this was ever done. However, they did use Manual to house some troubled elementary school kids — a program they want to move to their newly-acquired Knoxville building (the one that used to be the Social Security administration office). So, while they were supposedly trying to reduce the number of facilities to save money, they’ve actually acquired another one instead.

Sticking it to the East Bluff

After that, the plan talks about phasing out Glen Oak School and either building a new school adjacent to Glen Oak Park or expanding the Von Steuben campus to K-8. The school board got shot down on the park plan, but strangely, there’s been no talk of expanding Von Steuben as an alternative. Instead, the district abandoned the East Bluff and started focusing more on Harrison and the north valley schools.

So, now we’re up to the part of the plan where they propose to combine Irving and Kingman school into one new school which they want to put on or adjacent to Morton Square.

First, it’s worth mentioning that Glen Oak School has been lumped into this replacement school now, whereas it wasn’t that way in the master plan. One wonders if this is some sort of revenge on the East Bluff for thwarting the board’s plans to put a school adjacent to Glen Oak Park. I sincerely hope that’s not the reason, as it only hurts the children.

Second, it was recently reported in the paper that Morton Square is in an historic district, so the school board has taken that potential site off the table. Many neighbors in that area were opposed to that site, although some spoke out in favor of it at the community forums.

The illusion of inclusion

So now the school board says it’s considering the current Glen Oak School site and the site adjacent to Lincoln Middle School as possible locations to put the replacement school for Glen Oak, Irving, and Kingman. I’ll bet you any amount of money that the site adjacent to Lincoln school wins. Why? Because of the narrowly-defined criteria for site selection.

The school board has divided their site requirements into two categories: “size” and “amenities.” For size, they require:

• The site should be large enough to accommodate the District’s 120,000 sq. ft. B – 8
• Including ample fitness and wellness spaces, parking, and loading/unloading zones for buses and parents
• Single story building minimum site size is 12 – 15 acres without adjacent, accessible open space
• Two story building minimum site size 6 – 8 acres with adjacent, accessible open space

For amenities, they list these requirements as “desirable”:

• adjacency to parks and programs, libraries, recreational centers, not-for-profit community organizations providing—as part of their mission—services to school-age youth, and/or other similar such service providers
• adjacency to police, fire, and/or other public service agencies
• adjacency to other schools, including institutions of higher education

Given these criteria, very few sites are even possible in the older part of the city. The criteria favor the Glen Oak Park and/or Morton Square site, which are both off the table now. Since the Lincoln site is next to a park, next to a school, and arguably has the least amount of land acquisition required, it’s practically pre-ordained to be the site for the new replacement school.

The crux of the matter is that many people fundamentally disagree with the criteria the school board has set. Many people believe that a central location that minimizes busing should be high on the list of criteria. Many people believe that being near another school is not necessarily “desirable.” There certainly is no justification for the inflated acreage requirements.

But the criteria are not up for discussion. The school board has stacked the deck. They’ve asked the public to play a fixed game. We’re being given only the illusion of inclusion. Ever heard the phrase, “the house always wins”? The school board is the house in this game.

Future plans

If they continue following their “full plan,” we can expect Tyng and Garfield to be closed, Garfield to be demolished, and a new school built on that site. They’ll call the new school Tyng. Then Woodrow Wilson and Loucks will be shuttered and a new building will be built somewhere near Peoria Central High. While not stated, my guess this will be the new Renaissance Park “technology” school they want to build. I have no idea what site they will find, but it will undoubtedly be controversial, wherever it is.

The many and various pieces of Keller School will be combined into one new or enlarged building on one side of the road — which is actually a good idea whose time has come. I never understood why they would split an elementary school campus across a busy street in the first place.

Finally, Lindberg Middle School will be enlarged. Trewyn and Calvin Coolidge will be remodeled. And Whittier will get a new building on the same site… according to the plan.

The next community forum for District 150 is Thursday, October 4. However, rather than being held at Von Steuben, it was announced at the last meeting that the Oct. 4 meeting will be at Kingman Primary School instead, 3129 N.E. Madison.