Palatine Dist. 15 candidates rate school board's oversight of administration
The seven school board candidates in Palatine Township Elementary District 15 have starkly different ideas about a key part of the job: oversight of the administration.
Manjula Sriram and Gerard Iannuzzelli, who are seeking a second four-year term, defend their questioning of Superintendent Scott Thompson, charging other board members with rubber-stamping his proposals. But challengers say the incumbents micromanage what should be routine decisions.
The seven are running for three available seats on the board in the April 7 municipal election.
On the challenger slate are Jessica Morrison, David Gurion and Zubair Khan. Gurion, a sales manager from Palatine, and Khan, an attorney from Hoffman Estates, compare Thompson to a CEO, and the school board, to the district's shareholders. As such, Morrison, an attorney from Palatine, says the school board should give "great deference" to administrators in managing the day-to-day business of the 12,000-student district.
"We are not micro-managers. We are there to look at the big-picture policy issues and direct the district in that manner," Morrison said during a recent endorsement interview with the Daily Herald editorial board.
Morrison put members on the sharply divided board into two camps. The former majority of board President Peggy Babcock, Dave Seiffert, James Ekeberg and the late Richard Bokor, were good listeners, she said. The others whose seats are up are "more the obstructionist type."
"They're questioning everything (Thompson) does and things that should be routine and mundane to a board become issues when it doesn't have to be," Morrison said. "It should be a collaborative board that has a view of the policy and wants to take the district somewhere, not be divided and argue and bicker about things that are insignificant."
Khan said administrators do a "decent job" of getting experts to address the seven board members and answer their questions. "I think that should continue even more," he said.
One seemingly routine job, although administrators publicly stayed out of the fray, was the appointment of a new member to succeed Bokor, Gurion said.
"It's very apparent that there's two sides, and there's not a whole lot of giving in going on," he said.
With voting power up for grabs, the board failed to name a successor before a state-mandated deadline. Instead, the regional superintendent of schools appointed last week his choice, Gerald Chapman, a former school board president voted out office in 2011.
"The fact that they couldn't come together to just figure out a rubric or a process of how to figure out how to appoint somebody to fill his seat - that is an embarrassment," said Perry, who is the only candidate campaigning on his own, and who, if elected, pledges to resign from his district job as a program aide at Kimball Hill Elementary in Rolling Meadows.
On the other slate are board members Iannuzzelli and Sriram and newcomer Frank Annerino, an engineering manager from Palatine. The incumbents say they want to see more "information sharing" between the board and district leaders, citing a request they made in February asking Thompson and financial planners to come back to the board with options to avoid deficit spending.
Thompson agreed, but said at the time the board can refine the tentative budget in May. That's after the district has a clearer sense of health insurance costs and promised state aid, Michael Adamczyk, the district's chief school business official, told the board.
"It felt like you had to twist the arm to get that information," Sriram said.
Annerino also said the board's job is to tease the information out of administrators so "people understand why they're making these decisions."
He and his running mates suggested the other faction on the board approves Thompson's recommendations at face value.
"What I see a lot of, and I'm going to use this term, rubber stamping that goes on," Iannuzzelli said.