So, after a months-long search, the Proviso Township High School board had three finalists for its open superintendent post. A current superintendent of a public school district in a large county in Florida. An assistant superintendent at Thornton Fractional in the south suburbs. And the chief education officer at the Illinois State Board of Education.
Not bad. Better than we expected, actually, for a school district that has pushed out its past two leaders — one in a major error caused by political pettiness on the board; the other should never have been hired and would only have been hired by a flailing school board.
Due to the corrosive leadership of Supt. James Henderson over just two years, this Proviso post was never going to be a plum. A nasty teachers’ strike; logistical bungling in technology, food service and student transportation; abysmal test scores; and a sometimes unsafe school environment would all lead a rational educator, working to build a career, to have second thoughts about this job.
But Darius Adamson, Rena Whitten and Krish Mohip all said yes to being finalists for the job. Surely they could not have considered that during the last two school board meetings the search process would fully unravel with a board member insisting the search was fatally flawed and needed to be trashed, the school board president said she was under intense political pressure, and charges that not all school board members took an active part in the interviews of the finalists.
What an absurd and depressing situation a minority of this school board has created. It is both embarrassing and infuriating that, yet again, there is not a focus on making a hire who is simply attentive to our students. Instead, we have yet another clash of egos on a school board, which has chosen not to govern.
What’s next? Who knows?
Village’s financial hole
Forest Park’s village government has faced chronic financial shortfalls for decades. It’s both simple and complicated.
As a non-Home Rule community, its sources of revenue are constrained. While larger communities such as Berwyn and Oak Park have Home Rule powers just based on the size of their populations, smaller villages need voter approval to become Home Rule. Voters in Forest Park overwhelmingly rejected Home Rule decades back to avoid empowering the government to impose a raft of fees.
Meanwhile many of its steady stream of permitted fees have sharply declined. You can’t tax landlines if most people have abandoned them. A fee on cable bills drops as people shift to streaming, which can’t be taxed. TIF districts may expire. And voters chose to ban video gaming in town, a $1 million bonus fee.
The result is another large deficit in the upcoming fiscal year’s general fund. If all the currently budgeted jobs are filled and pension obligations met, the village will have a deficit of more than $2 million and declining reserves, too.
But the village has become more transparent in talking about its woes and more ambitious about finding new revenue. That’s a good start.
