Unhappy Crowd At Grayslake D46 School Board

We had quite a showing at the school board meeting last night:

Grayslake Elementary District 46 Superintendent Ellen Correll and other officials were blasted Tuesday night for what Lake County tea party leaders claim was improper use of publicly owned email systems before the April 5 election.

County tea party founder Lennie Jarratt of Round Lake Beach said during public comment time he’s turned over more than 300 pages of emails to the Lake County state’s attorney’s office and the Illinois attorney general. State law prohibits public resources from being used for political activity.
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Demonstrators smile outside before last night's D46 school board meeting.

Jarratt obtained the emails through open-records requests with District 46 and Northbrook/Glenview Elementary District 30. Mary Garcia, who was District 46’s board president until the changing of the guard Tuesday, is a teacher and union president at District 30, was the focus of many complaints.

District 46 resident Joan Seifert said school officials involved in the emails should apologize to her for their actions. Other who spoke contend the officials acted unethically and may have violated state law.

“You dishonor this community,” Seifert said.

Many of the 60 or so spectators had copies of a news release distributed by tea party members at the board meeting and read aloud selected emails that were posted Tuesday on the group’s website.

Garcia and Susan Facklam were the incumbents in the April election with political newcomers Shannon Smigielski, Kip Evans and Marchell Norris. Smigielski, Evans and Facklam were the top three vote-getters.

Several speakers criticized an email that apparently showed Garcia used her taxpayer-funded District 30 email to seek campaign assistance from a Lake County Democrat Party operative. Correll was chastised for potentially participating in political activity on District 46’s email.

Correll wrote an email to North Chicago Unit District 187 Superintendent Douglas Parks on behalf of Garcia on the afternoon of March 10. “Mary Garcia is wondering how many signs you would take?” Correll wrote to Parks.

Facklam was criticized by speakers for writing an email to Garcia’s District 30 account that implied she offered gift cards to a high school student encouraging her to get more friends to register to vote. Facklam arrived late to the meeting and declined to comment during a break, while Garcia was absent.

Round Lake Beach resident Joe Hubbard read an email that Garcia sent from District 30 to a Daily Herald reporter that expressed concern Smigielski, Norris and Evans were backed by the tea party and would bring partisan politics into a school board race. All three denied Garcia’s claim in a news story.

District 30 Superintendent Edward Tivador said officials there are investigating an ethics complaint that Jarratt recently filed over Garcia’s work email use. Depending on the findings, the District 30 administration can recommend discipline or termination of Garcia.

“We always take these matters very seriously,” Tivador said Tuesday.

Per typical operating procedure, neither the District 46 board nor Correll responded to the speakers during the meeting.

Board member Keith Surroz said he understood the crowd’s criticism of Correll and the others. He said Correll deserves credit for drastically cutting expenses at the district and managing to keep employee morale high.

“I think we have to look at what is there to see if it has significant merit," Surroz said of the political email attributed to Correll.

Correll declined to comment on the criticism, saying her focus is on education.

Tensions in the crowd at Grayslake Middle School ran high at one point in the meeting when the board discussed Correll’s yearly goal performance evaluation.

Board member Colleen Wade criticized colleague Michael Carbone because he didn’t submit an evaluation, which triggered hoots from the crowd. A Grayslake police officer walked into middle school library to monitor the session when the shouting became loud.

This is the text of the press release that was circulated:

Released School Board Emails Reveal Legal and Ethical Violations in Grayslake School District #46.

Activists of the Lake County Tea Party organization today made available on their website a collection of over 300 pages’ worth of emails obtained through two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, which they believe reveals legal and ethical violations, including offering rewards to people for registering to vote, conspiring to avoid required political disclosures, and political activity conducted by district employees using district resources and on district time.

“It's a sordid story about crime and corruption where anyone would least expect to find it: In a suburban elementary school district,” said Tea Party spokesman Paul Mitchell, of Hainesville.

“Don’t let them turn us in...” - The April 5th election was a hard-fought race in which five candidates (two incumbents and three challengers) were vying to fill three seats. Mitchell describes the two incumbent candidates, Board President Mary Garcia and Vice President Sue Facklam, as strongly pro-union. In one of the released emails, noting that the three challengers had been linked on the Lake County Tea Party website, incumbent candidate Mary Garcia wrote, "I think that all members of both Unions should be apprised of this information... There will be no collective bargaining with those 3 on the board. I am very afraid that Sue and I will not have the funds necessary to fight a ‘party’.” This email, sent to D46 Superintendent Ellen Correll, Assistant Superintendent Lynn Barkley, union leaders Christine Wilson and Diane Elfering, and fellow incumbent candidate Sue Facklam, was sent, like virtually all of the information we have, from Garcia’s email account in District 30 (Wed., Feb. 23^rd, 11:34 AM), where Garcia works as a teacher and is president of the teachers’ union. Campaign fundraising activity like this, using D30 public resources have already landed Garcia in front of a review board that was scheduled to meet Monday, May 2^nd.

In another telling email, Facklam, a voter registrar, writes about registering high school students to vote, and giving them gift cards: “Don’t let them turn us in; gifts to register to vote is probably illegal! I did offer Erika [Garcia’s 18-year-old daughter] more gift cards if she can gather up more friends!” (Wed., March 2^nd, 10:14 AM to Mary Garcia at her D30 account.) It is a felony to offer remuneration to anyone for voting or registering to vote.

“Lie and pay me cash” – The emails reveal evidence of extensive contributions, expenditures, and in-kind contributions that, Mitchell believes, ought to have triggered formation of a campaign committee, and been reported to the State Board of Elections. Garcia and Facklam’s campaign manager, Alex Finke, in what Mitchell calls one of the more egregious examples of their efforts to cloak their campaign in secrecy, wrote, “Anything you spend counts towards the 1999.99 that you and Mary would be allowed to spend. The only way around it, would be to lie and pay me cash. Then I could claim that I am volunteering for you.” (Mon., March 7^th, 3:55 PM, to Sue Facklam.)

The Superintendents Get Involved – D46 Superintendent Ellen Correll, who Mitchell says receives a compensation package worth over $200,000 per year to educate students, evidently spent quite a bit of her compensated time on election activities: “Mary Garcia is wondering how many signs or flyers you would take?” (Ellen Correll, on her D46 email account, to North Chicago D187 Superintendent Douglas Parks and to Mary Garcia on her D30 email account, Thurs., Mar. 10^th, 3:24 PM.) As a custodian of federal and state education funds, Correll is prohibited by law from participating in political activity of any kind.

Mitchell notes that these examples are only the tip of what appears to be a very large iceberg. “It’s our hope that the appropriate law enforcement agencies will take an interest and conduct a full investigation of these matters. But we have more FOIA requests pending.”

To download and view the entire collection of emails in pdf format, visit http://lakecountyteaparty.com.

This story has also been picked up by McHenry County Blog and Illinois Review.