No on Measure R

Oak Park's Tony Knight has some nerve to accept a raise when all other local superintendents waived theirs. His salary is comparable to the pay of much larger districts and on top of that he gets a raise in his gas allowance.

Why the gas allowance? Oak Park is relatively small with five schools.

Let's vote no on Measure R and see if our school board can learn to live within a budget and keep the spending under control. Dave McDonald Oak Park

It is with sadness that I write to say that I cannot support Measure R. The issue is not whether our schools need to be maintained- they do. Rather, the issue is whether the residents of Oak Park can trust the Oak Park Unified School District to spend their money wisely.

Several years ago, money that the district said would be used to modernize the multipurpose room at Brookside went to build a brand new, unnecessary principal's office and work room. The multipurpose room has not been upgraded.

Next, Oak Park voters passed a technology bond a few years ago which OPUSD promised would be used to upgrade and integrate the computer systems, upgrade science labs, and enrich the science curricula.

To date, virtually all of that bond money was spent on SMART Boards, dry erase boards with memory capability. Meanwhile, high school science labs have not been improved or upgraded.

At a time when state budget cuts have hurt all the school districts in this area, the Oak Park school board voted Superintendent Tony Knight a 3.25 percent salary increase, retroactive to the 2007-2008 school year, which is in addition to the 8.7 percent raise Knight already received in June 2007, so now Knight is paid as much or more than superintendents in surrounding districts which have many times more the number of students and schools than OPUSD.

Oak Park has not cut even one administrative position. Instead, cuts went directly to the classroom, with fewer electives and AP classes.

Under Measure R as written, the district can tear down its administrative office and build a new one before ever repairing the roof of Oak Park High School.

When the school board puts up a bond measure that will provide needed repairs to Oak Park schools and which will not allow the district to spend money on building a new district office, then I shall vote for it. Donna Klugman Oak Park

We should salute Jan Iceland and Ron Stark for their years of service, but we should vote them out of office for resisting change.

I don't know whether six or eight or 10 years is too short a term for term limits, but I do know that 16 years and 24 years is far too long for any one person to be in office.

As for Measure R, I think we should salute Mike Paule, Jay Kapitz and the others who have worked so hard to pass this bond measure and prior failed bond measures. If the school board fails again in getting a bond passed, the board should resign en masse.

But it will not have been entirely their fault if Measure R fails. It did not help to make taxpayers feel good about entrusting more of their money to OPUSD to have an article—and thank you to The Acorn for writing it—about how the OPUSD superintendent is paid as much or more than area superintendents with many more schools and many more students, at the same time that the board is cutting spending in the classrooms of our children.

Why don't we start focusing on spending taxpayer money on educating our children rather than on educating our superintendent?

I am quite certain that there has not been one benefit to one student or teacher in OPUSD by virtue of the board's expenditure of taxpayer dollars on our superintendent's PhD, and I am quite certain that every student in OPUSD has suffered by the reduction of funds devoted to the classroom.

If Measure R passes, it will be in spite of the board's mismanagement and many, many missteps. Kenneth Kossoff Oak Park