It was decades ago that this page first began to recognize the Stepford-like qualities of membership on the District 200 Oak Park and River Forest High School Board of Education. Whole people – thoughtful, complex – went in the door. But in a short while, they were transformed into part of a single-minded unit that asked too few questions, seldom questioned the norm and all had “Those Things That Are Best” tattooed onto their butts and burned into their brains.
Groupthink has been lessening a bit on OPRF’s board in recent years and, surely, it took a jolt when Sharon Patchak-Layman was elected to the board last year. Direct from her eight years of poking, prodding and instigating on the District 97 elementary school board in Oak Park, Patchak-Layman shifted her powers of discomfiture from Madison Street to North Scoville Avenue.
We applaud, and have typically endorsed, her singular efforts to listen to voices seldom heard in the school systems, to always advocate for more open and transparent governance of these critical but too often inner-focused schools. We have been troubled by successive school boards and administrators who have sought to marginalize Patchak-Layman and her out-of-lockstep views.
And so it pains us to agree with what seems to be the developing consensus on the District 200 board to censure Patchak-Layman later this week for her failure to see the conflict of interest she has placed herself squarely in. Rather than listening to parents upset with chronic dissonance over aspects of special education services – an entirely welcome role for a board member – Patchak-Layman allowed herself to be drawn into a specific case involving a parent, a student and school staff. That is a nexus where board members have no appropriate place.
We favor elected officials willing to ask hard questions respectfully. We admire persistence. We need elected officials who go out of their way to listen to those with voices too weak–or, sometimes, too shrill–to be readily heard. But what we most favor are elected officials who grasp the intrinsic power of their elected post. They are chosen ones, chosen to represent all of us. And their authority comes from knowing and respecting the limits of their role, in respecting the essential role of staff in operating an institution.
By working in support of a single student and family, Patchak-Layman took her authority as a board member and inserted it into a staff issue. In then refusing to recognize the line that she had crossed, Patchak-Layman further has refused to recuse herself from the issue.
This is not a place from which Patchak-Layman can work to change OPRF. She should recuse herself in order to avoid censure.
R.I.P. Angelina
There is something deep in us that is loosed when stories surface about animals actively abused. So it was in December when the Journal reported the story of the pit bull, chewed up and traumatized, and found on a cold porch on a dark night in Oak Park.
The village’s animal care staff captured this dog and brought her to the Animal Care League where she was patched and patted and refitted with the name Angelina. Last week after failing socialization testing, Angelina was put down. Folks at ACL are taking cold comfort in knowing that Angelina’s final month – warm, well fed, talked to, and appreciated – were in stark contrast to the vicious abuse she faced, likely as a bait dog in a dog-fighting scheme.
There is evil in this world. Angelina endured that. And there is good. The ACL saw to it that this poor dog knew that, too.