Leadership Matters January 2014

Pension legal battle looms, but schools provide good news … and lots of it

We put out a simple request for districts to submit photos and information. We were expecting a few responses. We got more than 200 photo submissions. Obviously, we could not use that many photos, but every district that responded is represented by at least one photo -- and the good work of thousands of volunteers illustrates once again how vital schools are to our communities. The holidays and 2014 look much brighter to many people in need thanks to the efforts of school districts throughout the state. We encourage you to submit photos and information about the great things you are doing in our schools as we plan to use them in future issues of our online newsletter. Leadership Matters wins national award Speaking of our online newsletter, you may have noticed the Bronze Medal that is a new part of our newsletter’s masthead. We found out a couple of weeks ago that Leadership Matters placed third and won the Bronze Medal in a national contest for association newsletters/magazines. The contest, which was sponsored by Association TRENDS magazine, attracted 470 entries according to the press release announcement of the award. Leadership Matters only has been in existence one year this month, but it has evolved into a great communications vehicle for IASA and also into what we hope is an interesting and informative monthly read for superintendents and other school administrators. Kudos also to our Illinois Statewide School Management Alliance partner IASBO as the school business officials’ quarterly magazine also placed third nationally in the quarterly magazine category. Congrats to Dr. Kelly Stewart! Dr. Kelly Stewart, superintendent of Benton Consolidated High School District 103, was honored as the Illinois Superintendent of the Year for 2014 at the recent Triple-I Conference in Chicago. You’ll find an in- depth profile of Dr. Stewart in this month’s newsletter. The committee made an excellent selection and Dr. Stewart will be a great representative of IASA and of all the great work being done throughout the state by our superintendents. IASA and the state’s superintendents all were beneficiaries of the way in which 2013 Illinois Superintendent of the Year Dr. Jane Westerhold represented the profession and the extraordinary positive press coverage she received. Dr. Stewart also has received great press coverage and her acceptance remarks were humorous, on point and a study in humility.

The battle lines have been school administrators and hundreds of thousands of other public workers and retirees are preparing to fight all the way to the Illinois Supreme Court to try and overturn the punitive – and what we believe to be drawn. Teachers,

Message from the Executive Director Dr. Brent Clark

unconstitutional – pension reform measures the General Assembly passed just hours after the March primary filing deadline in December. We, along with the Illinois Retired Teachers Association, filed a lawsuit on December 27 in Cook County Circuit Court challenging the pension reform law as unconstitutional. On January 3, the Retired State Employees Association of Illinois filed a similar lawsuit in Sangamon County Circuit Court, and the unions involved in the We Are One Illinois coalition, including the IEA and IFT, also are expected to sue. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but I do believe the real reason behind the passage of Senate Bill 1 was pure politics and that the ultimate end game will be some sort of tax increase, or at least the extension of the temporary income tax increase that is due to expire January 1, 2015. We also will remain on guard for attempts to pass a cost shift under the guise that school districts would be able to handle the additional costs because SB 1 will lower the normal pension cost. That may be, but what happens when SB 1 is declared unconstitutional? Our attorneys firmly believe the pension law eventually will be overturned based on years of case law, the very plain pension protection language in the Illinois Constitution, the expressed intent of the sponsors of that constitutional language, and some of what was said during the floor debate of SB 1 in both the House and Senate. There will be plenty of time to dissect the pension battle ahead -- and it ultimately will be decided in the Illinois Supreme Court -- so I’d like to turn my attention to some of the really good news items happening in IASA. School districts’ holiday response overwhelming School administrators, staff, teachers and students all over the state did so many wonderful things in terms of holiday caring and sharing that we were overwhelmed. You will see graphic proof of that in this issue of Leadership Matters in the form of more than 20 pages of photos and information about how school districts rallied to help those in need.

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