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Race Hustling on the U-46 School Board Part III


Part III


  As we promised last week, we intend to bring into the light disturbing matters of public interest in the words and deeds of U-46 Trustee Traci O’Neal Ellis. This week, insider dealing, greed and hypocrisy take center stage.
  We begin with the recent controversy over the proposed Elgin Math and Science Academy (EMSA). In June, the school board denied the EMSA charter school in a 4-3 vote (since overruled by a state commission), with Ellis changing her position from her previous vote in favor of moving forward with the charter process—a maneuver fellow board member Veronica Noland characterized as a “bait and switch.” In defending her reversal, Ellis cited her concerns that EMSA could not meet its goal to serve at least 60 percent “at-risk” students. In the education business, “at-risk” is coded language for what has become a racial spoils system in our schools. This premise for Ellis’ “No” is unremarkable insofar as it is well-suited to her divide-and-conquer racial politics. What was remarkable, however, was her extended comments in sympathy with the unions’ contract interests.
  Why is that remarkable? Well, there are two reasons, and together they combine to form a cause for grave concern for taxpayers—whether or not those taxpayers are in favor of charter schools. Perhaps no organization has spent more money to defeat charter schools than teacher unions. Charter schools undermine the teacher (and other labor) unions’ political power and influence, and the best interests of our children are not part of the calculus. As Elgin Teachers Association President Richard Johnson put it: “The EMSA plan just doesn’t seem to do it for me.” What is part of the unions’ calculus, what really does it for them, however, is buying politicians. And you might be surprised how cheap they come.
  In Ellis’s first election for the U-46 board, in 2011, Illinois State Board of Elections’ records show that in the last mandatory disclosure before the April vote, Ellis received four donations totaling $3,750. Of that total, $3,000 of that money came from Laborers International Union of America. In her 2015 reelection bid, Ellis filed a similar report showing six donations totaling $3,600. This time Laborers International Local 582 out of Elgin paid Ellis only $1,000, but the Elgin Teachers Association gave her $1,000 twice—on March 13 and again on March 24. That means that over the course of two elections, Ellis was financed more than 80 percent by public sector unions whose goal—quite understandably—is to extract the most amount of money from taxpayers for the least amount of work. Which raises the question: Who does Traci Ellis really represent?
  Traci Ellis, that’s who. But even if we put aside her history of ugly racial agitation and her unseemly union boosterism, Ellis’ sabotage of EMSA is astoundingly galling when we consider what this so-called public servant does for a living.
  Previous U-46 Superintendent Jose Torres left the district in 2014 to head the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA) in Aurora. IMSA sounds an awful lot like EMSA, doesn’t it? Indeed, the alternative schools are similar, except that we also pay for students’ room and board in Aurora. The Examiner does not take a position as to whether a residential public school for a select few is a sound investment of public resources; we only point out that it is expensive. We do so because in voting against EMSA for U-46, Traci Ellis cast aspersions on the financial viability of the non-residential EMSA. Why is this significant? Well, one of the most expensive hiring decisions Torres made after moving from U-46 to IMSA was appointing an Executive Director of Human Resources—quite a lofty title for a single school. Of course, such a lofty position needed to be filled by the most qualified candidate available in all the land, and coincidence of coincidences that candidate was one of Torres’s former bosses at U-46—none other than Traci O’Neal Ellis. How much does this “executive” set Illinois taxpayers back every year?
  A sum of $116,500 in salary and $133,987 in total compensation, including 20 annual vacation days (four weeks) worth $8,961, 16 annual sick days worth another $7,169, and if that were not enough, a couple of personal days thrown in for good measure. To Torres, however, that might not seem like much when he’s sitting on an annual compensation package of $371,563.
  So, when Traci Ellis spoke her truth about the finances of the proposed EMSA, she knew whereof she spoke. After all, if only two of the more than 250 employees at a single school cost taxpayers more than half a million dollars every year—not to mention millions more in future pension liability—Ellis might be onto something. Either way, she and her union money are certainly onto rank hypocrisy and feeding at the public trough. For Traci Ellis, alternative schools should not be available to our children—unless, of course, she can line her own pockets with our tax dollars.
  Finally, we need to point out that Torres, much like the unions, does not pave the way for Ellis out of the goodness of his heart. Before he left U-46—and well before his existing contract was to expire—Torres received a hefty raise, along with a new U-46 taxpayer-funded annuity separate from his massive state pension. Immediately after the vote on that generous new contract, Ellis took her seat on the school board and became a cheerleader for Torres and his policies until the day he left. Torres shared Ellis’ penchant for identity politics, and together they worked hard to inject race and ethnicity into the formation of district policy. As they say in their social justice circles, both of them are quite “woke.”
  As we look ahead to the next election, we see that U-46 parents and taxpayers also need to become “woke.” Woke to destructive, self-dealing politicians. Woke to public sector unions and employees who buy and sell elected officials and who are bought and sold by them. We need to become woke because the corrupting relationship between Ellis and the U-46 superintendent did not go away with Torres and his moneybags. Current Chief Executive Officer Tony Sanders is dancing the same divide-and-conquer dance with Ellis today, and the sickening details will be the subject of Part IV in this series next week.

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