Editorial: Local schools, colleges should be controlled locally, not in Springfield

Legislators' efforts to meddle in the affairs of local community college districts stalled Friday and for all the right reasons. Liz Brown, of the Illinois Council of Community College Presidents, summarized the point precisely in testimony before a Senate committee Thursday.

“I think this is reactionary legislation for one bad apple,” Brown said.

The “bad apple,” of course, is College of DuPage. Its $763,000 buyout of former President Robert Breuder created a local uproar, and state representatives and senators from DuPage County have been falling all over themselves this spring to make a show of doing something about it.

Among the proposals:

• A cap limiting contract buyouts to no more than one-year's salary;

• Restrictions on country club memberships, housing allowances and other contract perks;

• A three-year limit on the length of a community college president's contract;

• Provisions forbidding the placement of a former president's name on a college building;

• Limits on the amount of emergency cash community colleges can keep on hand;

• And even a proposal requiring COD to send its trustees to professional board training.

Space does not permit an item-by-item denunciation of these suggestions, but it ought to be clear to anyone who believes in local control of primarily property tax-supported institutions — including public K-12 school boards — that they share a common defect. They assign to the state authority that ought to be assigned and exercised locally.

It can be persuasively argued that the College of DuPage Board of Trustees did not exercise its responsibility very well when it decided three years before his contract was up that it had had enough of Breuder and was willing to pay three-quarters of a million dollars to show him the door,

But that board was acting according to the authority properly vested in it by the taxpayers and voters of the College of DuPage district. And it was acting in what a majority of members felt was the best interest of the college.

In the ensuing furor, the district's voters responded in no uncertain terms at the polls that the board was mistaken. Sending a message that ought to reverberate to districts everywhere in Illinois, they handily elected a new board majority committed to reform at COD.

The merits of this new board's work remain to be seen, and we're in no way prepared to sign on with every action it takes. But whatever policies and practices emerge, they ought to come from this board, the duly elected trustees answering to the property taxpayers who are overwhelmingly responsible for funding the school's operations.

To be sure, executive salary creep is an issue in community colleges. It's also an issue at four-year institutions and at elementary and secondary school districts. The blizzard of legislative proposals following the COD scandal take none of this into consideration, and they virtually ignore the precedent they would set for other locally supported governments.

We understand the outrage over the Breuder buyout, and we share many of the concerns other critics have expressed. The response, though, should come not from a hasty political show in Springfield, but from the thoughtful actions of local board members listening to the direct voices of local communities that elect them.