If there’s a word that Oak Park and River Forest elected officials use more than “collaborative” it is “transparent.”
“Open” this, “accountable” that, “transparent”everything. This is all well and good, and our local officials do get above average marks when it comes to good governance. But when the time comes, and it’s here again, for an elected board to make its most important decision — to hire a new chief executive — the doors close, the blinds are drawn and we get secrecy worthy of the Vatican when a new pope is chosen.
Why?
Why can’t the process of interviewing the three finalists to be village manager, school superintendent or park district executive director be announced and open to the public? Why can’t citizens have a chance to watch how the candidates take questions? Wouldn’t it benefit a board to watch its top candidates respond to questions from citizens? And, we’d argue, it would be fair to offer candidates the chance to meet potential constituents and get a sense of the town they seek to serve.
To our amazement, the then-stodgy board at OPRF tried this open approach back in 2006. For reasons having more to do, in our estimation, with bad boardsmanship and election politics, it was a strange and elongated search process with first-round candidates dropping away and the top choice from the second round rejecting an offer.
When a new superintendent, Attila Weninger, was finally hired, the board leadership that selected him had already been turned out by voters.
Inauspicious way to start.
Now with Supt. Al Roberts retiring after five years at the District 97 elementary schools, that school board has gone the safe route and hired one of the handful of basically interchangeable superintendent search firms. We find them interchangeable because they’re all made up of now retired superintendents who recruit other superintendents to apply for job openings they are well paid to fill. It is the ultimate closed circle because the actual pool of superintendents is just a bit wider than that for NFL head coaches.
And the search firms hate the idea of having their candidates made public. No one will apply if the process is public, say the recruiters, because then their current school board bosses will know they are looking.
Full-tilt hooey. Every village manager and school superintendent is looking and almost from the moment they are hired. They want to move up to a bigger town. They want new challenges. They want to get away from a recently elected board that is looking snake eyes at them in executive session. They want to switch states to game the pension system. They want a new job before they are fired from their current job.
It is the nature of this branch of public service. There is no shame in looking. Certainly there is no shame in being a finalist in a community as well-thought-of as Oak Park. Open the process.