McHenry County Blog

The Daily Herald’s Chris Bailey reports the profound observations of a District 300 college student who is driving home to vote, “No.”

Jeffrey Bleicher of West Dundee has written a not-yet-published letter that says, in part,

This is the business of education, and it is more important than a lot of other businesses. Until they start cleaning up their act and treating the district like a business venture, I will vote “no” this spring.

Bailey writes,

Most people in education have their hearts in the right place, but very few appear to grasp the dollars-and-cents realities. That’s partly because until just recently, school districts took teachers or principals and human resources directors and made them superintendents and finance managers. They were willing, but not really qualified to manage multimillion dollar budgets.

She has most of the story, but there's more. She would have had to have been on the House floor in 1975 or do too much research to figure out that the first state law passed by teacher Dick Mulcahy required that any school business manager (that’s what the finance people were called then) had to have a master’s degree in education.

Remember, this was in the middle of a recession during which all sorts of well-qualified finance people were being laid off.

For the rest of the story, click here.