Welch gets D209 to pay his legal bills

On Monday the Proviso Township High Schools (District 209) board of education approved paying over $22,000 in legal bills to the law firm representing board president Emanuel "Chris" Welch. Forest Park Review (Josh Adams) has the details.

There are seven members of the board of education. There are six votes in the block controlled by Welch and Eugene Moore. There is one member of the opposition: Theresa Kelly.

I know that a number of "Whites" who follow D209 matters are suspicious of Kelly. They argue that she's just like the political hacks running the district; the difference is that she's not on their team.

Kelly deserves credit for being on the board of education and raising issues. If Kelly didn't get elected in 2007, the Welch-Moore block could conceivably have a 7-0 majority.

Being in a 6-1 minority is a lonely place. And Kelly could have just given up. Instead she keeps reading the information presented to board members and she keeps asking questions.

Illinois law prohibits school board members from being compensated for their service. Also, they are supposed to spend the taxpayer's money educating students, not paying their personal legal bills.

While Welch's behavior was almost assuredly illegal, let's not overlook the board members who voted with Welch. Are they clueless?

Also, the Forest Park Review article shows what a toady Libka is.

Superintendent Robert Libka said he did not question Welch's attempt to pass the expense on to taxpayers, but said after the meeting that Kelly's argument against paying the bill merits a second look. According to Libka and Kelly, Welch informed board members several weeks prior that he intended to seek reimbursement. With Kelly offering the only objections, Libka said he did not see a reason to disturb the apparent harmony on the matter.


"It seemed appropriate at the time," Libka said of reimbursing Welch's legal bills. "I probably have more questions now, but I still feel the same."

Go read the FPR article for further details.

Libka simultaneously claims paying Welch's legal bills seems appropriate because it was somehow related to his duties as a board member and that Libka didn't know the details of the case.

Here's a quick recap.

Welch was blogging anonymously as Proviso Insider.

Proviso Insider accused attorney Mark Sterk, of Odelson and Sterk, a firm that had respresented D209 in the past, of counseling Melrose Park police officers to obstruct justice.

Sterk filed a defamation suit against Proviso Insider. See this Proviso Probe entry for a starting point.

Libka's explanation for paying the personal legal bills of a school board member shows that the man is ignorant of the law and just a go-between. When Libka is speaking on issues of import he's a wind-up toy given words by the board president.

Proviso BOE meeting for December

On Monday, December 17, Proviso Township High Schools (District 209) held the regular meeting of the board of education at Proviso East High School. Board member Brian Cross was absent, as was his boss, Eugene Moore.

What happened that was noteworthy?

Board member Robert Cox and Superintendent Robert Libka talked about accountability. Cox expressed that the board would be working for the betterment of the district; Libka said he wanted the community to “look to proof of strategies and achievement” in the electronic newsletter.

Below you can read the follow-up questions on improving the district and accountability.

The meeting agenda included some terminations. Board president Emanuel “Chris” Welch said that the board would take action that would make it unnecessary to eliminate any jobs. How this was accomplished was not explained.

Board member Theresa Kelly was not happy with how the board meeting was conducted. She got a different agenda than the rest of the board members. Kelly is the lone opposition board member. People including the district's attorney became impatient as Kelly complained in closed session. Eventually, the district's attorney realized the problem and apologized for the misunderstandings.

When the board returned to open session board president Welch had everything as part of the consent agenda. I did not hear him call for items to be pulled from the consent agenda. After the vote on the consent agenda Kelly asked for items that she wanted pulled and discussed separately. Welch refused to call items separately, which is somewhat out of character. Normally, he's a reasonably flexible with board members. He let's the opposition ask questions. This time Welch offered to let Kelly switch her vote on the consent agenda, but he wouldn't open any individual issues for discussion.

Kelly probably should have realized that it was an omnibus consent agenda, but I don't think Welch ever clearly asked for items to be pulled from the consent agenda.

Kelly wanted to raised the issue about employees, especially support staff employees, who had already been terminated. Kelly thought it would be fair to undo the terminations already conducted since the terminations on the December agenda were being canceled.

(Normally board member Reatha “Sue” Henry, Eugene Moore's cousin and chief of staff, is willing to vote against the majority to prevent terminations. However, Henry's daughter, Shavonne Henry, is a secretary who was spared termination even though secretaries of equal or greater seniority were let go or forced to retire.)

Proviso West Dean Dylester Palm, sister of Principal Alexis Wallace, has retained a law firm to contest the furlough she was forced to accept.

Below are the questions I posed to Libka and the board of education in an email.

Last night both board member Robert Cox and Superintendent Robert Libka expressed intent to make District 209 better and a desire for the community to hold the district accountable.

By what measures does the board and administration want to be judged? I am particularly interested in learning your ways of measuring student performance and financial health of the district.

Also, some of the metrics only happen once a year, like standardized tests and the budget. Based on what information should taxpayers judge the academic and financial performance of the district quarter-to-quarter and month-to-month?

Welch & Johnson should come clean

Yahoo (David Crary, AP):

NEW YORK - The American Red Cross ousted its president, Mark Everson, on Tuesday after learning that he had engaged in a "personal relationship" with a subordinate employee.

The woman was not identified, but I expect if she was the one in charge of the Red Cross' money that would have been part of the story.

When I asked Emanuel "Chris" Welch, president of Proviso Township High Schools (District 209) board of education if he was dating Nikita Johnson, who was then the business manager and has since been promoted, Welch responded with, "I don't discuss my personal life with the media."

It's time for the board of education and Superintendent Robert Libka to ask the question of both of them. "Are you two dating?"

District 209 is a district with a history of crony politics in both jobs and contracting. The FBI is investigating the district for something.

Five of the seven board members are quite passive, letting themselves be bossed by Welch and political boss Eugene Moore (Brian Cross and Reatha "Sue" Henry work for Moore at the Cook County Recorder of Deeds). One of the passive board members, Robin Foreman, is Johnson's aunt. Foreman has been pushing for D209 to hire Johnson for years, going back to when Foreman was active with the boosters.

On top of that the district the superintendent, Libka, is very much a "go along, get along" kinda guy who avoids confrontation.

Libka and the board need to ask Welch and Johnson what's the story. There are rumors they are engaged. And they have been dating since summer 2006.

If they are involved, one of them should resign to remove the conflict of interest. Remember, being a school board member is an unpaid position that is supposed to be about serving the community.

If the president of the Red Cross had to resign because of a relationship with a Red Cross employee, it seems like Welch should resign if he's involved with the person overseeing all the money at the district.

This is especially true since it's likely that there are serious questions about how Johnson spent some of the money.

D209 has a regular and special meeting on the same night

Proviso Township High Schools (District 209) board of education had a regular and special meeting last night.

The most significant points:

1. The district will borrow from its reserves to meet payroll on Friday. This is necessitated by Gov. Rod Blagojevich vetoing the property tax legislation last week. This delayed the county sending out bills. And the delay sending bills will cause the county to delay paying school districts.
2. During public comment a freshman at Proviso East said she does not feel safe in school. Another woman raised the issue of class sizes.
3. Bill Kirchner of Forest Park pointed to a number of non-educational areas where D209 spends lavishly compared to Morton and New Trier. And then he pointed out that on educational salaries and expenses D209 spends less than these districts.
4. Kevin McDermott of Westchester raised a number of questions about the budget. He pointed to discrepancies between the budget online and the one briefed to the board at the meeting. He pointed-out that the budget has grown 13% a year for the last two years while former superintendent Stan Fields and business manager Nikita Johnson have been crowing about deficit cutting. McDermott also criticized the budget for having large amounts of money under "other".
5. Barbara Cole of Maywood questioned the move to dismiss the foundation. She alleged the board ended the foundation project b/c the people working on it were insufficiently loyal (in a political sense) to the board of education. Cole also expressed a preference that the district conduct a nation-wide search for a new superintendent.
6. Robert Libka was given a one-year contract for $160,000 to be superintendent.
7. I raised the issue of the president of the board of education, Emanuel "Chris" Welch, dating the business manager, Nikita Johnson. I said this was relevant to the budget because Welch is approving his girlfriends (fiance's?) budget.

[UPDATE: Forest Park Review (Josh Adams) has his coverage.]

District 209 aggregator

I'm behind on writing about Proviso Township High Schools (District 209), including giving more detail about Monday's board meeting.

But here's what others are writing.

Proviso Herald (Chuck Fieldman) has an article on Robert Libka saying he wants to be superintendent. The article doesn't include any quotes from people critical of Libka or the fact that Libka used district funds without board approval to attend classes at Western Illinois University last time he was in charge of the district. Libka's course work at WIU caused him to be absent from District 209 during the work week, something he did not clear with the board of education in advance.

Forest Park Review (Josh Adams) emphasized the budget almost being balanced and mentioned the increase in attendance driven by the board placing Fields on administrative leave.

Forest Park Review (Josh Adams) digs into the story of District 209 parting ways with the designers of the district's web sites.

Forest Park Review also has an editorial on school budgets, both District 209 and Forest Park elementary schools (District 91).

Proviso Insider also wrote about the board meeting.

District 209 cans Stan Fields, hires Robert Libka

At tonight’s special board meeting the District 209 (Proviso Township High Schools) board of education voted to place Superintendent Stan Fields on paid administrative leave pending a termination hearing.

Former CEO Robert Libka was offered a 60-day contract as the interim superintendent.

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Four board members voted affirmatively for these moves: Brian Cross, Robin Foreman, Reatha “Sue” Henry and Emanuel Chris Welch. Dan Adams was absent. Robert Cox voted against both moves. Theresa Kelly voted “present” on the issue of removing Fields and opposed hiring Libka.

The meeting had to pause when the move to hire Libka was announced. The audience was laughing loudly enough to disrupt the meeting.

The board took some other actions.

The contract with Glenn Gerard to consult on the Proviso foundation was terminated. And the group that had been working with Gerard was disbanded. As I understood the meeting the foundation will still be created, but it will be done in-house. Gerard was brought to the district by Fields.

The student codes of conduct were approved 6-0.

Kelly raised the issue of Fields being paid a bonus. When she asked the rest of the board if Fields had been paid a bonus no one would respond. Also, after the meeting Kelly reminded people that board member Charles Flowers had pushed for a review of Fields’ performance while he was on the board. Kelly made it sound like Welch resisted the performance review.

Also, the police liaison agreement with the Village of Hillside was approved “as discussed in closed session”. Board president Emanuel Chris Welch who makes money billing school districts for legal work used this language twice. This discussion should have happened in open session. When I questioned the lawyer from Giglio & Del Galdo about why this was handled in closed session he said it was a personnel matter.

The Open Meetings Act provides for discussing personnel matters in closed session because of the issues about privacy and candidly discussing performance. Renewing a contract with a police department doesn’t fall in this category. If one applied the Giglio & Del Galdo analysis any contract where the services were ultimately provided by people would be a personnel matter to be discussed in closed session. Construction would be discussed in closed session because personnel would be used by the contractor to do the construction.

I also think canning the superintendent was a violation of the Open Meetings Act. I think removing a superintendent needs to be specifically publicized in the agenda. The heading of “Personnel Matters” seems too vague.

Feel free to discuss the back story in the comments.

[UPDATE Tuesday, 8:56 AM: Getting lots of traffic this morning.

[What do you think of Fields getting canned? Bringing back Libka? How should the community react? What should other public officials do to make District 209 a properly functioning school district?]

[UPDATE2: Forest Park Review (Josh Adams) has a good summary. The board members for terminating Fields declined to give reasons. But the attorney told Adams it wasn't because of the federal subpoenas. There's more to the article. Good read it.]

[UPDATE3: Chuck Fieldman seemed to think the earliest Proviso Herald would cover the story is Wednesday, eight days from now. But he was wrong. See Proviso Herald (Chuck Fieldman)

Cox said he had been advised to "not comment on the logic of the Board's decision to remove Fields as superintendent." He added that he wants his "no vote" to speak for his view of whether Fields should have been placed on leave, pending a termination hearing.

[Bob, Bob, Bob, feel free to consider the possibility that the people giving you advice are giving advice designed to serve their interests, not you, the board, the taxpayers or the students.]

[UPDATE4: I talked to Cox this morning (August 6) and he voted against putting Fields on administrative leave and for hiring Libka.]

Robert Libka & Tommie Miller have a history of looking out for each other

Proviso Insider:

The Insider is hearing rumors that the former CEO of Proviso Township High Schools District 209, Robert "Bob" Libka, is about to be named the number two person in charge of Bellwood School District 88.

Proviso Insider has good sources at District 88 (Bellwood & Stone Park elementary schools).

Proviso Insider characterizes Libka as affable. But Libka is agreeable because he's an incompetent that lets the world happen around him. He genuinely tries to be nice to everybody, but he accomplishes little to nothing.

I pretty much avoided discussing the allegations against Tommy Miller, Proviso West boys basketball coach, and now president of the District 88 board of education. The allegations are rather sordid and will inflict substantial hurt on Miller's family.

But there were allegations made that Tommie Miller was a serial sexual predator against student athletes that he coached. Miller allegedly had sexual relations with numerous female student athletes he coached including his wife when she was in high school.

These allegations were reported to Libka when he was CEO of Proviso Township High Schools (District 209) and Libka declined to investigate. (However, when anonymous allegations were made against a board member who was a Welch opponent, Libka photocopied these allegations and sent them to the entire board. The allegations were that this board member had a homosexual encounter.)

Miller is a political ally of Emanuel Chris Welch, who was president of the District 209 education. Miller was a board member at District 88 where Welch was racking-up massive legal bills as the district's attorney. At one point Welch billed District 88 about $200,000 in a six-month period.

Libka declined to investigate, but Chicago Public Schools did investigate the same allegations against Miller. CPS found the allegations "not substantiated", but I am skeptical of these conclusions.

The most solid piece of evidence against Miller is that his wife had a child at 16 years old in October. If you go back nine months Miller's wife was a 15-year old finishing basketball season.

The allegations against Miller include the detail that he reached financial settlements with the families of the girls/young women involved.

My experience doing similar investigations for the Navy was that the bureaucracy will contort logic into a pretzel to find messy sexual allegations unsubstantiated. If CPS substantiated the allegations against Miller, not only would CPS have to explain to the media that it had a sexual predator in its schools, it would also have to explain why CPS continued to OK Miller being in CPS after his sexual relations with student athletes were first detected. And CPS would have to explain how the information about the initial investigations disappeared from CPS records. And this would lead to follow-up questions. How many sexual predators has CPS allowed to stay in the school system? How does a sexual predator get results of investigations purged from his records?

So, CPS had plenty of incentive to find the allegations against Miller "unsubstantiated".

Libka can't find a job in a real school district. So he's come back to Welch and Miller so he can get the big buck for looking the other way while the political bosses enrich and empower their cronies.

ED, Stan Fields scheduled to be on "Viewpoints" [D209]

Proviso Township High Schools superintendent Stan Fields, PhD, is scheduled to appear on "Viewpoints From the Other Side" on WJJG, 1530 AM, Saturday, March 17, 2-3 PM.

My understanding is that Fields will take questions from guests that call the show.

I drafted some questions that I hope get asked. I'm not satisfied with the list, so if you can improve the wording, please make suggestions. Also, feel free to suggest new questions and comment which questions you think are more important.

What's the best policy you've implemented at Proviso Township High Schools?

You advocate reducing the number of classes--all but eliminating electives--and concentrating on subjects covered by standardized tests. Would you choose to
attend school or send your children to high school in a district that implemented this policy?

Critics have said that eliminating electives is a cost-cutting policy disguised as an education policy. How many teachers could be cut if you succeed in reducing the number of classes?

When you were superintendent of Mundelein High School you implemented various cost-cutting policies and revenue enhancement policies. What services or
functions did you outsource or privatize? Did you recommend other services or functions be privatized only to have members of the board of education stop
you?

Is it true that board member Theresa Kelly sent you email requesting an issue be put on the agenda five times before you responded? And did you wait to respond until after the deadline for putting new action items on the agenda? And did you tell Kelly
that it was impossible to fulfill her request because the deadline had passed? Did you realize that Kelly's requested agenda item was not an action item? Were you deliberately working against the desires of board member Kelly? Or did you erroneously apply Illinois law by neglecting the difference between an action item and discussion?

During the superintendent's report of you first Proviso school board meeting (September, 2006) you opened the door to attacks on board members Charles
Flowers and Theresa Kelly. You gave board president Chris Welch a list of computer hardware that was "missing". Welch read one name from the list: Charles Flowers. Your list claimed Flowers had custody of a District 209 computer. Where was that computer? Did you ever apologize to Flowers?

During that meeting you accused board member Theresa Kelly of maintaining the funds for the Proviso East Wall of Fame in an illegal manner. Where does the bank
send the statements for that account? Have you changed how that fund is managed? Do you still think it is managed in an illegal manner?

You have alleged that board members have received cash advances for board travel but not reconciled the travel claims upon returning. What are the dates of these unrecognized travel claims? Which board members have unrecognized travel claims? What have you done to reconcile these travel claims? Have these board members traveled at District 209 expense since you became superintendent? Why didn't you require them to reconcile the past travel claims before allowing them to travel again? How much money do you expect to recover when these travel claims are reconciled?

You have referred to the "nonsense of the past" as if you are a break with past practices, even though Chris Welch remains president of the school board.
Specifically, what bad behavior was part of the "nonsense of the past"? What have you done to reduce or eliminate the "nonsense of the past"? Did your predecessor, Robert Libka, engage in the "nonsense of the past"? Why is he still on payroll?

The Daily Southtown has run a number of articles that insinuate that Kyle Hastings is a career ghost-payroll government worker. How many hours per week does Hastings spend at the PMSA building?

The issue of political patronage hiring is now openly acknowledged. In the past board member Theresa Kelly would ask if the political bosses had lobbied the superintendent or HR director on behalf of any applicants. If you assume that the superintendent and
HR director were answering questions truthfully then it seems likely that the politicians were working directly with department heads and staff members below
the superintendent to parcel the patronage. Would you be surprised if Chris Welch, Eugene Moore, Claude Porter, Ron Serpico, Dan Coglianese or their representatives were lobbying members of your staff to get "their people" jobs at District 209? Have you taken any action to stop or discourage this meddlingin hiring?

There are rumors that school board president Chris Welch and your business manager, Nikita Johnson, are dating. If this is true would it violate any laws or school district policies? Does it violate any of your policies? If it was true, would you fire Nikita Johnson?

How do you measure the level of violence at Proviso Township High Schools? What policies have you implemented to reduce violence against students and staff? Have your policies reduced violence?

These are some other subjects for which I haven't drafted specific questions:

• Open Meetings Act
• website
• EMM, unnecessary insurance payments to Eugene Moore
• why is Eugene Moore "in the loop" on district decision making
• nominating petitions

"Viewpoints From the Other Side" is a weekly radio program hosted by Arnie Bryant.