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Regional superintendents say their jobs are necessary

SPRINGFIELD — Want a job in a school that brings you into contact with kids? You’ll be in contact with the regional superintendent of schools’ office.

Want to drive a school bus? You’ll be in contact with the regional superintendent’s office. Need a GED? Ditto.

And if your kids skip school, you may not want to hear from the regional superintendent’s office, but chances are it’s their staff that will be knocking on your door.

The state’s 44 regional offices of education are charged with a wide range of responsibilities under Illinois law. Usually, the jobs are carried out with little fanfare or notice from the public.

But Gov. Pat Quinn’s decision to veto money from the state budget to pay regional superintendent salaries and those of their assistants brought a new spotlight to the offices and what they do. It’s also led some to suggest the entire offices be eliminated because they are a needless level of education bureaucracy.

That’s not the view of Rep. Roger Eddy, a Hutsonville Republican who recently served on a task force that looked into ways of streamlining education.

“In my part of the state, they provide a lot of services and a lot of statutorily mandate requirements,” said Eddy, who is also superintendent of the 400-student Hutsonville school district. “Somebody would have to explain to me how those services would be delivered in a more efficient manner.”

Last spring, Eddy served as the ranking Republican on the House committee that set the elementary and secondary education budget. The issue of regional superintendents and their budgets was thoroughly debated, Eddy said.

“Once we looked at their function, there wasn’t any way to replace them,” Eddy said.

Jim Berberet is the GED coordinator in the Sangamon County Regional Office of Education. He said the office administers more than 400 high school equivalency exams a year, counting those given to people who take the test more than once. Roughly 200 GEDs are awarded annually.

Mostly the tests are given at Lanphier High School in Springfield, but the regional office must also make accommodations for special cases, like tests in Braille or large print or people with learning or physical disabilities.

The Sangamon County office scored nearly 19,000 exams because it is one of only 18 sites in the country that is licensed to score the essay portion of the exam. Sangamon County also scores the GED tests that are given in state prisons.

In addition, the Sangamon County office has a contract to administer about 400 GED tests annually in suburban Cook County, where the suburban Cook County regional superintendent’s office was abolished several years ago.

When you work or volunteer in a school in a job that comes in contact with children, you have to pass a background check. If a person changes school districts, he or she must to undergo a new check.

The process begins by reporting to the regional office and being electronically fingerprinted. The prints are then transmitted to the Illinois State Police, which conducts the check. Last year, the Sangamon County regional superintendent’s office initiated more than 1,500 background checks.

Lyle Wind’s job is to annually inspect every school building in Sangamon County, whether or not it is occupied by students. In Sangamon County, about 80 buildings are student occupied and another 40 that are not, ranging from storage facilities to stadium press boxes. Specifically, Wind checks to see if buildings are in compliance with safety codes and identify deficiencies.

Parochial schools are inspected along with public schools.

New and remodeled buildings also need the ok from the regional superintendent’s office before they can be occupied.

Wind is also in charge of training for school bus drivers. There’s eight hours of training involved for new drivers and a two-hour annual refresher course. More than 500 people go through both the new driver and refresher sessions.

Mary Loken is the office’s special education coordinator. She is in charge of the Sangamon County Safe Schools program, which is for students with behavioral problems that are disruptive in a regular school setting. About 45 students a year go through the program.

The regional office also runs the Sangamon County Learning Academy, a place for about 60 students who do not do well in a traditional learning environment. Loken described them as “kids who march to their own drum.”

John Linxwiler is the truant officer for the office. He and two case workers last year tracked down 585 students listed as truant. The caseload will probably increase. A recently enacted state law says a student is truant if absent without a valid cause for nine days. It used to be 18 days.

In some cases, a student may be considered truant because of a registration error or because a family moved without notifying the school, Linxwiler said. Other times, it may be because a student is not attending school. The truant office’s job is to find out what is happening.

The regional office runs truancy board hearings that attempt to get children back in school before they end up in court. Representatives of the regional office, state’s attorney, state Department of Children and Family Services, the school district and child’s family are part of the hearings.

Linxwiler’s salary is paid by Sangamon County, as are all or part of the salaries of three other full-time and one part-time employee of the office. Together, their salaries come to more than $160,000.

In all, 41 people are listed as employees of the Sangamon County regional superintendent’s office -- both full- and part-time - not including those who work in Cook County on the GED contract.

Regional offices are also responsible for issuing teaching certificates and conducting professional development workshops for educators and administrators. Those jobs ould still have to be done if the regional offices didn’t exist.

“There has to be a regional delivery system,” said Matt Vanover, spokesman for the state Board of Education. “They provide a number of services that could not be provided on a statewide level.”

With 870 school districts, it is impractical to run the programs administered in the regional offices from a central location, he said, especially when the state board’s own staff has been cut by hundreds.

Tri-City School Superintendent David Bruno said local districts also aren’t in a position to assume the duties of regional superintendents.

“We would have to hire additional personnel,” Bruno said. “That would mean we would have to reduce in other areas. I don’t feel comfortable taking away from kids.”

Rochester School Superintendent Thomas Bertrand said his district benefits from the regional office handling background checks and school bus driver training, saving the district both time and money. He also cited the Safe Schools program and Sangamon County Learning Academy as big plusses.

“There’s an underlying theme here, too, with state mandates we have to deal with,” Bertrand said. “They help us meet those mandates. The bottom line is the mandates have to be met. The state board has been cut. They don’t have the resources.”

Not all states use a system of regional superintendents to act as a layer of administration between a state-level education department and local school districts.

A survey by the Education Commission of the States showed 17 states without a system of regional superintendents. The other 33 states did have some level of administration between the state and local school system, although their structures varied widely.

Eddy, who is also Hutsonville school superintendent, said direct state-to-state comparisons don’t make much sense.

“States are different. Illinois is a local-control state,” Eddy said.

Illinois has more than 800 school districts, far more than most states. That makes it more necessary for Illinois to have an administrative level between the state and local districts.

How states fund their schools also makes a difference, Eddy said, as does the sheer size of the state itself. Eddy said it is possible that having state bureaucracy take over jobs now performed by regional superintendents could cost more than keeping the regional offices in place.

“The delivery system has a lot to do with other (education) issues in a state,” Eddy said. “It’s comparing apples and oranges.”