Tag Archives: District 150

Peoria Public Schools

Audit shows budget errors and omissions at D150

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Holy Toledo. I don’t generally read the Peoria Story blog, but Billy Dennis quoted a portion of this post, and it was so shocking I had to read more.

I’ve read past District 150 audit reports (available here*), and they’ve always been bad — bad enough that it makes me wonder why in the world Guy Cahill is still employed by the district. For example, here’s a note from the June 30, 2007 audit report:

In an ideal control setting, the District would have personnel possessing a thorough understanding of applicable generally accepted accounting principles staying abreast of recent accounting developments. Such personnel would perform a comprehensive review procedure to ensure that in the preparation of its annual financial statements that such statements, including disclosures, are complete and accurate.

And this:

The overall internal controls over the District’s accounting system are not adequate to ensure that misstatements caused by error or fraud, in amounts that would be material to the financial statements, may occur and not be detected within a timely period by employees in the normal course of performing their assigned functions.

That was the second year in a row the district got that last note. The 2006-07 audit was also the one that reported the district’s misallocation of over a half million dollars in Title I funds. But evidently the latest audit report takes the cake:

“The November 14, 2008 audit report, prepared by Clifton Gunderson LLP, for the 2007-08 school year, shows the District #150 administrators failed to budget $10,410,849 when budgeting for Teachers Retirement Service (TRS) pension contributions. […]

“This was not a new expense – the district has been budgeting for “on-behalf of” contributions to TRS for years. Their actual expenditure for this item during the 2006-07 school year was $7,264,468. How did they “forget” to budget over $10 million in expenditures – and revenue – for the 2007-08 school year?

“Further, how and why did the TRS provision grow over $3 million in one year? Did teacher salaries increase so much in one year that 10% of that increase amounted to $3 million?

Since the revenues and expenses for “on-behalf of” contributions to TRS effectively cancel each other out, the issue is more about transparency than anything else. If the public were to see that this fund grew by over 43% in one year, they might start asking questions — like, “why is that amount rising so dramatically?” and “what other information is the district hiding?” With omissions this great, how can we believe anything the school administration says about the budget and the need to close a high school? Incidentally, the “on-behalf-of” contributions are not on the 2008-09 budget that was submitted to the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE), either.

Something I’ve always wondered is how District 150 can keep sending incomplete reports to the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE). For instance, the last three years (2006-2008) of the district’s Annual Statement of Affairs (available here*) leaves required information completely blank, including salary schedules and non-salary payments over $2500. It is required by the State that the district report this information, and yet it hasn’t for multiple years, keeping taxpayers (and the State regulating agency itself) in the dark. With as many administrators and consultants as District 150 has, surely someone could be tasked with completing required reports.

These questions deserve answers. The information reported on Peoria Story has been forwarded to District officials. It will be interesting to hear their response.

*Note: If you want to look up the financial data or Statement of Affairs reports on the ISBE website, they’re listed by the district’s code number, which is 48-072-1500-25.

Chamber of Commerce, Peoria Public Schools

Chamber supports D150 “efforts to make tough decisions”

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Here’s a curious press release I received today:

Chamber Supports District 150’s Difficult Decisions

Peoria (January 23, 3009) –District 150 has some difficult decisions ahead due to significant budget deficit predictions. The Peoria Area Chamber of Commerce supports the district’s efforts to make those tough changes for the future of our educational system.

Members of the school board and the Chamber board met this morning at the Heartland Partnership office to discuss the status of District 150. Superintendant [sic] Ken Hinton said the district ended the 2007-2008 school year last July with a very small surplus (for the first time in nine years) of $300,000 on a budget of $140+ million.

They approved a balanced budget that same July for the 2008-2009 school year but almost overnight, the economic downturn set in and now there is a projected $9 million budget deficit for the 2010 school year due to a variety of funding changes.

Hinton acknowledges that some very tough choices will have to be made including whether to close or merge schools. While that is not a popular topic among many in the community, Chamber Board Chairperson Deb Ritschel says change is inevitable.

“We must focus on the long term effects this decision will have and the overall big picture.” Ritschel went on to say “Many people are emotional about the thought of closing or merging schools, but we have also [sic] look at the realities and focus on the business perspective of this issue which means dealing with capacity issues and matching revenues and expenses.” The goal, Ritschel noted, is to balance the business side of things while continuing focus on student achievement.

The Chamber Board was asked to help by getting community leaders to be a voice of this effort in hopes of changing the perception of the public schools in Peoria. Ritschel responded saying “The Chamber will support the district as it positions itself to ensure children today and children in the future have a stable school system providing a quality education.”

This raises a number of questions, so I’ll just start rattling them off: Which school board members met with the Chamber of Commerce? Was the Open Meetings Act followed (i.e., was the meeting properly noticed)? Who initiated the meeting, District 150 or the Chamber? Why?

And what is it with the tortured language of this press release? I’m having a hard time figuring out exactly what they’re trying to communicate. Can anyone explain to me what these two statements mean?

  • “The Peoria Area Chamber of Commerce supports the district’s efforts to make those tough changes for the future of our educational system.” There’s bureaucratic doubletalk if I ever heard it. What they’re literally saying is this: They’re not supporting any specific decisions, but just generally supporting the district’s efforts to make “tough decisions.” Way to go out on a limb. For the record, I support elected bodies’ efforts to make tough decisions, too. In fact, I support everyone’s efforts to make tough decisions. I mean, we all face tough decisions at some point in our lives, and, darn it, I support your efforts to make them.

  • “The Chamber Board was asked to help by getting community leaders to be a voice of this effort in hopes of changing the perception of the public schools in Peoria.” What exactly do they want community leaders to do here? Inform the community that District 150 is trying to “balance the business side of things while continuing focus on student achievement”? (I think we sort of expect that out of District 150; I mean, that is their job, is it not?) Or “[support] the district’s efforts to make those tough changes”? (See the previous bullet point.)

More questions: How many of these Chamber Board members have children who are attending District 150 schools? How many of these Chamber Board members currently operate a business that “match[es] revenues and expenses” (i.e., has a balanced budget)? (Hint: we know one who doesn’t.)

Perhaps the biggest question is, shouldn’t the district be more interested in getting the parents’ support than the Chamber’s?

Peoria Public Schools

Protest planned against school closings

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Well over 100 people crowded into the banquet room at Godfather’s Pizza Thursday night in reaction to District 150’s proposal to balance the budget by closing and consolidating schools. Included in the crowd were teachers, students, coaches, staff members, parents, alumni, and other concerned citizens. The meeting started at 5 p.m. and lasted about an hour and a half. Terry Knapp was the moderator and several people spoke. Here’s a small sampling:

[flashvideo filename=http://peoriachronicle.com/wp-content/uploads/Video/WHS-Protest.flv /]

My thanks to Terry, Jeff Adkins-Dutro, and Hedy Elliot-Gardner for letting me publish their comments. Jeff and Hedy are running for union president and vice president, respectively.

In case you didn’t catch it, the plan is to hold a protest outside the District 150 offices on Wisconsin next Tuesday at 5:30 p.m., prior to the board meeting. School board meetings are normally on Mondays, but next Monday is the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday. The goal is to have 300-400 people from demonstrating against closing Woodruff High and other schools slated for closure.

The concerns with closing schools are many:

  • Larger class sizes — When Manual was restructured, the district emphasized that it was important to establish/maintain “small learning communities.” Now they want to combine schools that will lead to large classes of 29+ students. To make matters worse, the district is also trying to take special education children out of their special classes and integrate them into regular classrooms. So now, in addition to having larger class sizes, teachers are going to have the added pressure of helping special ed kids keep up with the rest of the class.

  • Mixing rival gangs — I’m not up on Peoria’s gang situation, but several attendees who are aware of it expressed concern about putting a lot of kids from rival gangs in the same school building. It poses a number of security problems.

  • Combining of athletic teams — Kids who are able to make the cut for, say, basketball in their respective schools now will end up being cut from the team when players from both high schools are combined to make one team. For some of those kids, sports is what keeps them in school and keeps them connected; and being cut from the team will raise the likelihood of them dropping out.

  • Edison schools not on the chopping block — No one can understand why the district wouldn’t cut Edison schools’ contract before closing down schools. A lot of money could be saved by getting rid of that private, for-profit company’s contract.

  • Consultants/administrators not on the chopping block — At the same time the administration is talking about closing schools and cutting teachers, they are adding more administrative staff. Why wouldn’t they cut the fat in the administration before they start making cuts that impact students?

As I listened closely to the rally Thursday, I noticed that this was not just about schools closing. There are some deeper issues that are frustrating the teachers. Consider that the teachers and principals found out about the District’s proposal to close and consolidate schools from the press. The assistant principal of Woodruff first heard it on the 10:00 news Wednesday night. It’s bad enough that the administration doesn’t consult their teachers and staff for input on these matters; the least they can do is inform them of their plans before they tell the news media and general public.

There was also frustration that no union representatives were at the meeting Thursday. Many teachers were incensed that Peoria Federation of Teachers president Scott Schifeling wasn’t at the meeting Thursday night, nor was anyone from the union’s executive board. An attendee who had talked to several board members reported to the group that they weren’t attending the meeting because they “felt slighted that they weren’t invited.” Not exactly the way to inspire confidence among the teachers.

Expect a lot of protesters Tuesday night, and a lot of people lined up to speak to the school board during the public comment period of Tuesday’s meeting.

Peoria Public Schools

Woodruff High School may close

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From WMBD-TV:

The district is proposing the following: Closing Tyng primary school and consolidating Harrison, Garfield, Tyng and Trewyn into three pre-kindergarten through 8th grade buildings. The district also wants to close Woodruff High School and essentially merge it with Peoria High.

And from the Journal Star:

With the proposed closure of Tyng this year, students from Tyng, Garfield, Harrison and Trewyn will be consolidated, making the three open schools all pre-K through eighth-grade buildings.

Irving and Kingman also are on the list to close by the end of this school year; the Lincoln-Woodruff site would reopen as a pre-K through eighth-grade campus.

To curb the total number of students at a merged Woodruff-Peoria high school, officials proposed creating a “ninth-grade academy” to be housed at Loucks School for a year until Peoria High could be expanded. That’s provided the renovations at Thomas Jefferson school, closed this year because of a fire, are completed in time, because those students now are at Loucks. Eighth-graders at Hines and Von Steuben schools who would have attended Woodruff or Peoria High would attend Richwoods under the plan.

This plan actually makes sense. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not at all happy about school consolidation, larger class sizes, fewer teachers, or the loss of neighborhood schools. I still think that District 150 administration is top-heavy (and heavy on consultants, aka rehired retirees) and that cuts should start there. But assuming that the school district’s financial situation is as dire as they say it is, and assuming that consolidation is the only way to bridge the funding gap, this makes sense.

High school enrollment is not high enough to support four high schools in Peoria. Geographically, we have one high school to the north (Richwoods), one to the south (Manual), and two that are very close to each other in the middle (Central and Woodruff). It would make sense to close one of the high schools in the middle. Central is the older and more geographically centered of those two schools; it makes sense to keep it.

Reusing the Woodruff/Lincoln campus accomplishes two things: it lowers construction costs because a new primary school won’t need to be built on the campus, and it preserves the building for future use as a high school if enrollments go up again someday. I also like the return to K-8 schools instead of the primary/middle school setup.

However, Terry Knapp and Martha Ross are right. The board needs to solicit and seriously consider ideas from parents, teachers, principals, and staff members — not just make decisions in a vacuum. “It seems like just one or two people are making the decisions,” Martha Ross said, according to the Journal Star. Unfortunately, that’s standard operating procedure for District 150.

Education, Nation/World, Peoria Public Schools

Michelle Rhee: Blueprint for urban schools?

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I heard a story on NPR the other day about the chancellor of the Washington (D.C.) public schools, Michelle Rhee. She has a plan for improving the struggling urban school district:

She has proposed a new contract for the union that would undermine tenure, the teachers union holy of holies. The carrot is money. By tapping Mayor Fenty and private philanthropists, she is hoping to make D.C. teachers the best-paid in the country. Current teachers would actually have a choice. If they are willing to go on “probation” for a year—giving up their job security—and can successfully prove their talent, they can earn more than $100,000 a year and as much as $130,000, a huge salary for a teacher, after five years. If not, they still get a generous 28 percent raise over five years and keep their tenure. (All new teachers must sign up for the first option and go on probation for four years.) Rhee predicts that about half the teachers will choose to take their chances on accountability for higher pay, and that within five years the rest will follow, giving up tenure for the shot at merit pay hikes.

Of course, the goal of this is not only to reward successful teachers, but to get rid of “incompetent teachers,” as Rhee puts it elsewhere. The teachers union says, “You can’t fire your way into a successful school system.” Rhee counters that tenure does nothing to improve student achievement and only makes it harder to terminate poor teachers, which is bad for the children. The union questions Rhee’s ability to judge who is or is not a good or competent teacher. And back and forth it goes.

Rhee has a bargaining chip: charter schools.

About a third of D.C. parents now opt to send their kids to charter schools, which are public schools—but where the teachers are non-union. The union has lost more than a thousand of its more than 5,000 teaching slots during the past decade. Rhee, it appears to many, is not interested in protecting turf. If she can open more charter schools that are better than the regular city schools, she seems willing to let the old system wither away.

In either event, if Rhee gets her way, many are saying that it will have a ripple effect through the nation, with many other urban school districts trying to follow in Rhee’s footsteps.

District 150 is starting to look into charter schools, and on an unrelated note they’re looking for creative ways to save money. For the new math and science academy, they’re even looking to partner with Bradley University; such an arrangement “could help the university develop and train better teachers, as well as provide a better educational opportunity within District 150.” No word yet on what relationship charter school teachers would have to the union.

So, should District 150 follow Rhee’s plan for improving urban schools? Or, to put it another way, should Peoria’s public schools make tenure-busting and/or union-busting part of their strategy?

Peoria Public Schools

Schifeling being challenged for PFT president’s spot

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Jeff Adkins-Dutro, a Peoria High School Teacher, and Hedy Elliott, a Garfield primary school teacher and daughter of popular radio personality Royce Elliott have recently launched a campaign for President and Vice-President respectively of the Peoria Federation of Teachers (PFT) Union. Dutro and Elliott are challenging current PFT President Scott Schifeling.

See the full story on Peoria Pundit.

City Council, City of Peoria, Peoria Public Schools

Noteworthy news links

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Here are some news items from the Journal Star that caught my interest:

General News

Still under the weather

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I’m still under the weather, hence no new posts. Sorry. If I had time and felt like writing, I would put up posts on these topics:

  • St. Louis Cardinals first baseman Albert Pujols is the 2008 Most Valuable Player.

  • Ken Spirito is leaving Peoria. He got another job someplace else — I think on the radio they said Newport News. Congrats to him. He certainly improved air service to Peoria while he was here. Of course, he also raised taxes through his ambitious new terminal building project.

  • District 150 is going to raise taxes again. They take more of our money each year, yet things never seem to get better.

  • The Heart of Peoria Commission meets this Thursday morning at City Hall. Yes, we usually meet on Fridays, but our regularly-scheduled meeting would have ended up on the day after Christmas. So we rescheduled the December meeting for November 20.

  • Why do people write Ann Landers with their problems? What is the thought process? “I’ve got to get help with this problem. Should I talk to my friends? My spouse? My favorite uncle? My pastor? My therapist? No! I’ll write to Ann Landers, instead. Because the best advice comes from a total stranger who knows nothing about me or my situation other than what I tell her. Besides, I would be too embarrassed for one other person to know my secret problem; I’d much rather share it with newspaper readers across the nation instead.”
City Council, City of Peoria, Peoria Public Schools

Circumvention of voters nearly complete

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One of the final steps toward issuing bonds through the Public Building Commission (PBC) for new public school construction will take place Monday night as the Council approves the siting of the new schools. District 150’s ability to access PBC funds was made possible by the efforts of local state representatives George Shadid (now retired) and Aaron Schock. And the reason it was made possible was blatantly to circumvent the voters.

The school board could have put a binding referendum on the ballot asking voters to approve funding for their building plans. Ask anyone at the district or your state representatives why they didn’t do that, and they’ll tell you that they believe a school bond referendum would never pass. Hence, the “need” to go around the voters and get the money through the PBC.

I have a fundamental problem with that process. You have to ask yourself why they think a referendum wouldn’t pass. Consider, for instance, that voters in communities near Peoria have recently approved similar referenda, and voters in Peoria recently approved by a large margin capital funding for library improvements. So you can’t honestly argue that a referendum would never pass.

If a referendum were to fail, it would not be because voters don’t want to make needed upgrades to schools, but because they don’t like the district’s method of “upgrading” them. In other words, voters would use the power of the purse to approve or disapprove of the district’s building plans. For instance, consolidating Irving and Kingman schools into a new primary school building next to Lincoln Middle School and Woodruff High School probably wouldn’t have garnered enough votes because the residents didn’t want to see those neighborhood schools close. Attempts to build a new Glen Oak School at Glen Oak Park would certainly not have gained enough votes because residents very loudly and clearly stated they didn’t want the school sited there.

By circumventing the voters, it not only took away the residents’ decision regarding funding, but also its influence in the design and siting of the new buildings. So when the council communication on the agenda for Monday night says, “The concerns of neighbors have been addressed in the siting process,” that’s really not true. There were public meetings, after which the school board did exactly what they said they were going to do in the first place (with the notable exception of changing the site for Glen Oak School due to a lawsuit that effectively blocked an intergovernmental agreement between the park district and school district). There were public hearings about the design of the schools after all the decisions had been made and there was no intention of changing them.

Public input was a sham because the school board didn’t have to listen to the public or win their approval. They had their construction money regardless, thanks to their being granted access to PBC funding. So they did what they wanted regardless of public opinion. And that’s why you don’t see many people attending D150 public hearings or board meetings these days. Doing so is like a broken pencil: pointless.

Peoria Public Schools

Thomas Jefferson school damaged by fire

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As one of my alert readers mentioned in a comment to another post, Thomas Jefferson School was damaged by fire today. Fortunately, there’s a fire station literally across the street — Fire Station 11. Nevertheless, about $250,000 worth of damage was done according to the Journal Star. Classes will be canceled tomorrow and relocated to Loucks after that. Here’s more info from a District 150 press release:

Sunday Fire Causes School Cancellation for Students At Thomas Jefferson Primary

Students at Thomas Jefferson Primary School will not have school Monday, November 3 due to a Sunday morning fire at the school building. As to not disrupt the learning process and to help our many working families who are inconvenienced by school cancellations, District crews will be working non-stop to prepare the vacant Loucks-Edison building for the Thomas Jefferson students to return to classes on Tuesday, November 4. Classes will continue there until further notice.

Some of our special education students will be relocated to Jamieson and the Developmental Center. Contact with these families will be made on Monday to provide more details.

Starting Tuesday morning, a shuttle bus will be available for students who normally walk to Thomas Jefferson. These students need to be at the front of Thomas Jefferson School until 8:30 a.m. Students will be dropped off at the same location at the end of school, approximately 3:30 p.m. There will be supervision at the bus stop in the morning and afternoon. Parents who normally drop off and pick up are asked to take their student(s) to the Loucks building if possible. All regular bus riders will follow their normal schedules.

Thomas Jefferson staff will need to report to the Loucks-Edison library at 8:30 a.m. on Monday. Staff need to dress casual. Following an informational meeting, they will be setting up classrooms and preparing for the students’ return on Tuesday.

The District notified parents of Monday’s cancellation via the emergency phone system. On Monday, the District Administration will establish a hotline for parent questions and will make frequent updates to the District website, www.psd150.org.

There are currently 470 students enrolled at Thomas Jefferson, including 55 who are part of the special education programs.