BUDGET LIES AND LIARS -- That three quarters of a billion dollars that Rahm's people 'cut' from the CPS 'administrative' budget? David Vitale could tell you that it never existed -- if he checked his notes from 2006. Reminder -- If you're going to tell a lie, tell a whopper and repeat endlessly...
Eight years ago, as the first graphic with this article shows, the Chief Executive Officer of Chicago's public schools (Arne Duncan), the Chief Administrative Officer (at that time, David Vitale), and the Chief Financial Officer (at that time, Pedro Martinez) stood before a press conference to detail the fiscal (FY 2007) 2007 budget for reporters. It was June 6, 2006, and in those days CPS officials hosted regular press conference at CPS headquarters so that reporters could ask questions and get answers from the officials who supposedly knew about such things as, in this case, the budget of the third largest school system in the USA.
JUNE 6, 2006. David Vitale and Pedro Martinez stand beside a sign explaining the allocation of funds for the 2006 - 2007 school year. Not that the pie chart shows that "Administration" was only $198 million and amounted to 4.2 percent of the total budget of a little less than $4.7 billion. Standing in the photo above is David Vitale (who at the time was the CPS "Chief Administrative Officer"), behind the sign. On the right is Pedro Martinez, who at the time was CPS "Chief Financial Officer." Vitale went from CAO to Board President. Martinez went from Chicago's CFO to a top educational post in Nevada, even though he has never taught and didn't hold a teaching or administrative certificate in Illinois. Note that the Jun 2006 version of the budget did not cut a piece of the pie to single out the "pension crisis." At the time, and throughout history, pension costs were included as a part of General Education, since they were always a part of teacher and PSRP compensation. That changed in 2007, when CPS propagandists began singling out the cost of "Pension" as a separate slice of the pie and beating the drum about the "pension crisis" which they had caused by not refusing to pay into the pension fund for years and years. When the above photograph was taken, Arne Duncan was standing on the right at the podium answering reporters' questions. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.On that day, eight years ago, the Board presented a pie chart showing that after five years of "reducing administration", Arne Duncan and his "team" had brought the total cost of what they then called "administration" to less than $200 million.
Three years after that, Arne Duncan was U.S. Secretary of Education. David Vitale was President of the Chicago Board of Education. CPS had had a half dozen or so "Chief Financial Officers" since Pedro Martinez left for Nevada.
And CPS officials tried to tell the public that between May 2011 and July 2014, under the sharp-eyed administration appointed by Rahm Emanuel, CPS had cut "administration" by $740 million!
At three budget hearings held in Chicago on July 16, 2014, various officials of the nation's third largest school system presented the public with a 15-page Power Point. And on one of those pages, the officials claimed that an administrative budget that in 2006 was around $200 million had somehow bloated up to around a billion so that the miracle team assembled by Rahm Emanuel was able to cut three quarters of a billion dollars from it!
One difference between June 2006 and July 2014 was that the Board of Education no longer holds press conferences, so reporters don't get to answer questions. And if a reporter has a question, the answer is likely to be given by a person from the CPS "Office of Communications" who doesn't know anything about the complexities of the $6 billion CPS budget, but is adept at repeating from a scripted talking point and feigning offense when a reporter charges that what is being said in bullshit.
JULY 16, 2014. By 2014, Chicago Public Schools officials were providing the public with one of the most dishonest statements ever made by Chicago leaders. Above, the Power Point slide presented to the budget hearings on the fiscal 2015 budget at three hearings, and expected to be presented to the Board of Education meeting on July 23. There never was three quarters of a million dollars in administration to be cut, so all the numbers in the above array are simply an example of cooking the books. And when asked about those claims, Rahm Emanuel has told reporters that those cuts were from "administration." CPS officials quickly ran through the Power Point but refused to provide members of the public or the press with copies of the document, ensuring that the public would face the lies without a lot of documentation. Substance graphic a photo of the Power Point presentation during the July 16, 2014 budget hearings.
And so, there was not reporting in Chicago's corporate media since Rahm Emanuel became mayor in May 2011 of one of the bigger lies told by one of the more astute and cynical liars in the USA -- viz., that Rahm's wizards had found three quarters of a billion dollars to cut from an administrative budget that had only been about $200 million a few years earlier.
