As far as negotiating salaries with the teachers union, Mr. Lloyd writes:

For those who have asked and those who may be curious, the board has chosen to continue to follow its established protocol, thus the board has opted to continue to use district administration along with the board’s attorney to handle contract negotiations on behalf of the board. There will be no board member at the negotiating table or in the room as an observer.

This should be changed, in my never-to-be-humble opinion.

A lot of school districts who are buying energy from the Illinois Energy Consortium, as he has learned through his Freedom of Information requests, did not use a competitive bid process.

One of those school districts is Round Lake, as Lennie reports.

He says:

You might be asking yourself why I am holding out Round Lake as different than other particpants in the IEC, IUPC, or other energy consortiums who did not competitively bid energy contracts. The answer is simple, Round Lake schools have been under State Finance Authority since 2002. In other words, while under State Control, the school district has been allowed to continue the practice of no-bid contracts.

The SFA fixed the glaring financial mismanagement that had been rampant in the district necessitating the State oversite. They allowed the no-bid practice to continue that has enabled other State organizations, the IASB, IASBO, and the IASA to collect millions of dollars at the expense of the taxpayers.

Lennie notes that the Illinois Senate and House are pushing through bills as fast as they can to legally exempt school districts from having to get competitive bids.

It’s urgent that you contact your senator and representative. Lennie shows you how to do that.

Why not post the District 211 checkbook online?

But, really…it’s all about the kids.

Illinois pioneer of school district transparency.

Here are the first few sentences of the update as it now reads with my comments:

On May 11, 2006, the District 211 Board of Education approved the best offer received in the District’s request for proposals for electric and natural gas.

It has been reported over and over again and even, I think, stipulated in the court filings, that there were no written requests for proposals issued by the District. At best, I believe that a District 211 employee made some phone calls. So I think it is a significant exaggeration to refer to “the District’s request for proposals”.

Shame on them for writing that.

The Board reviewed its action on May 25, 2006, and determined that the Illinois Energy Consortium (IEC) was its best option.

Of course, as we have reviewed here, the Board made that determination after being given some documents from District 211 administrative personnel that showed higher prices from Constellation New Energy (CNE) than CNE had quoted to the District. The Board was not told that the prices it was looking at were not the prices that had been quoted by CNE, but were instead, a district employee’s speculations about what CNE should have said, not what it did say.

During the last several months of 2006, District 211 saved in excess of $133,000 compared to the Com Ed rates it had been paying.

As I’ve said on this blog umpteen times, the real question is how much did District 211 pay in those months versus what it would have paid if it had gone out and gotten competitive bids for electricity and natural gas, not versus what it might have paid to ComEd.

However, I got an email in the last few days that raises a different question. Here’s what that email says:

The district claims that savings for the period 8/06-12/06 was more than $133,000. Being in the energy industry, I submit to you that it would have been impossible to beat the ComEd default rate that was in place at that time. Real market prices were much higher and no power supplier could/would have sold power below ComEd rates that were still frozen through December 2006. If anyone has copies of IEC bills for that period I would be happy to do a comparison benchmarked to what the true rate would have been with ComEd.

The right thing to do would have been to advise all school districts to move back to ComEd for the period 6/06-12/06 since there was no savings versus the utility. My guess is the IEC couldn’t do that due to contractual obligations with their power supplier. By the way, has it ever been disclosed who the power supplier is for the IEC? Want to bet that the power supplier to the IEC hasn’t been put out to bid in years? I doubt the IEC would be willing to show proof of any bid occurring.

Zettler started compiling pension stats five years ago after he questioned how his suburban school district was spending money. What he found stunned him.

“There are over 1.100 teachers who have pensions of over $111,000 a year and they can retire at age 55,” said Zettler.

It is stunning.