Board agrees to put district documents online and in libraries

Nov. 10, 2005

By Nadia Malik
Daily Herald Staff Writer

In an effort to increase its transparency, the Palatine Township Elementary District 15
board agreed Wednesday to place several documents on its Web site.

Teacher salary schedules, the packets the board receives before meetings and a full
budget will all be available to the public without having to file a request through the
Freedom of Information Act.

The documents will also be available at the Rolling Meadows, Palatine and Barrington
public libraries, which all sit in the district’s jurisdiction.

“That allows anybody who doesn’t have a computers to go into the libraries and examine
documents,” board President Scott Boucher said.

The board also recently decided to start taping its meetings, which have been playing on
public access television in Hoffman Estates, Palatine and Rolling Meadows. A schedule of
the air dates is available on the district’s Web site.

These same tapes will also be placed in all three libraries.

Many of the documents that will be made public played an integral role in the tax-rate
increase request the district had on the ballot in February and the board elections in
April.

Some residents, for example, took issue with the raises the teachers have received in
their past negotiations with the district.

Board vice president Tim Millar asked that an explanation of the teacher salary schedule
also be placed on the Web site, since the document is hard to read and caused some
questions during the elections.

School improvement plans for each of the district’s 20 buildings and the collective
bargaining agreements for all three of the unions the district deals with will also
appear both on the Web and in the libraries.

Millar originally brought up the issue at the October board meeting, and Boucher had
questioned some parts of the proposal at the time.

On Wednesday, he said that after exploring the issue – including searching other school
board Web sites to see what kinds of documents appeared on their site – he felt
comfortable with the idea.

“I was making sure that this was talked about before we did it,” he said.