Elmhurst D205 Union Pact Secret For Now

ELMHURST, IL – The Elmhurst school board is set to vote Tuesday on the teachers union contract for the next three years.

This document will guide most of the district's operating budget, 90 percent of which comes from local property tax dollars.

Yet taxpayers are barred from seeing the document until after the board approves it. Taxpayers cannot weigh in on the contract until it's too late.

Elmhurst School District 205 is following its customs and those of most other Illinois districts. Patch wrote about the district's similar secrecy in May 2021, the last time the board approved a teachers union agreement.

Meanwhile, other contracts such as those for bus services are released to the public days ahead of time. Yet the dollar values of those agreements are far less.

In recent weeks, the board has been holding closed sessions to discuss the contract. The current pact is set to expire at month's end.

Patch left messages Friday with school officials asking why the public should be kept out of the loop until after the vote.

Jim Collins, the school board member who heads the district's finance committee and is often seen as a taxpayer advocate, was among the officials who did not return a Patch message.

No law stops a school district from releasing a union contract before a board vote. But many districts say they are working on final language, so they have no finished document to disclose. Yet boards around the state virtually always approve agreements once they reach a board vote.

This is not the way it works elsewhere. In Colorado, teacher union negotiations must be public. For instance, Jefferson County Public Schools in suburban Denver has a complete schedule of its livestreamed union negotiations on its website. Two decades ago, Colorado started requiring completed bargaining agreements to be posted online. Idaho's teachers union negotiations are also open to the public.