Lyons Township Gets $1.3M In Settlement

LA GRANGE, IL – The Lyons Township High School board decided this week to end a long-running dispute with an agency that manages area schools' money.

In a unanimous vote, the board settled its litigation with the Lyons Township Treasurer's Office. As part of the deal, the high school is set to get $1.3 million. The treasurer's board voted for the pact in a special meeting.

In 2021, the school prevailed in court in its nearly decade-long effort to separate from the treasurer's office. But the school later alleged the treasurer still owed it $2 million.

Treasurer Ken Getty could not be reached for immediate comment Thursday morning.

Unlike other documents related to its meeting this week, the high school board has yet to post online the settlement agreement. Patch asked for it.

The litigation in which the high school prevailed in 2021 started when the treasurer's office was mired in scandal. In 2015, the disgraced former treasurer, Robert Healy, was convicted of stealing $1.5 million in school money and sentenced to nine years in prison for the theft.

In a message to area superintendents last year, the high school's superintendent, Brian Waterman, said state law required the treasurer's office to transfer all the high school's assets upon the school's withdrawal.

But Waterman said the treasurer did not transfer all the money and refused to meet with high school officials about it.

Instead, the office announced it would transfer the more than $1 million to certain other districts, Waterman said.

"LT now knows that the (treasurer's office) failed to transfer a total of over $2 million in assets belonging to LT," Waterman said in the Feb. 22, 2023, email.

The treasurer's office, however, said in an email to area superintendents that the high school refused "our sincere desire to enter mediation."

Michael Thiessen, then-president of the treasurer's board, told the other superintendents that $1.2 million was to be reallocated to the other districts because of accounting and distribution errors committed by "convicted felon" Healy.

"According to our review, the actions of this felon resulted in Lyons Township High School receiving an extra $1.2 (million) to the detriment of other Lyons Township School Districts, quite possibly your district," Thiessen told the other superintendents.

Tensions have marked the two public bodies' relationship for years.

In a closed board meeting a year ago, high school board member Michael Thomas spoke about what he referred to as a conspiracy theory that involved the treasurer's office, the village of McCook and the village of Willow Springs.

He pointed to officials in those public bodies that he believed orchestrated the opposition to the board's proposed land deal with an industrial developer.

During the closed meeting, he never provided any direct evidence of a conspiracy. Colleagues expressed doubt.

The recording of the closed meeting was never supposed to get out. But the attorney general found the board illegally closed the doors to discuss the land deal and required the board to release the audio.

Thomas has not spoken publicly about the conspiracy and did not return Patch's message last year about it.