Few tears were shed in the hallways and the classrooms of Cook County’s schools last year when state lawmakers put an end to the long-beleaguered history of the county school superintendent.
Come the summer of 1994, the agency that garnered a reputation as patronage-laden and often drew the wrath of school administrators, will be no more.
After successfully fighting off years of efforts to dissolve the office, then School Supt. Richard Martwick in 1991 lost the battle when the General Assembly approved legislation to eliminate the agency by August 1995.
County Board President Richard Phelan and some lawmakers didn’t think that was soon enough, and last year the legislature approved a bill that moved the date up to June 30, 1994.
But now there are indications this whole plan was never fully thought through. In fact, the man who was given the job of essentially dismantling the office is himself raising questions about how much of the agency can truly be eliminated and whether the state is equipped to take over the job.
Under the legislation approved last November, the State Board of Education has been designated to take over the duties of the Cook County office.
But how much of the workload the state can assume still is uncertain said Lloyd Lehman, the new county school superintendent. As a result, all the talk of eliminating a layer of government bureaucracy remains in doubt with the ultimate result being that one agency will be traded in for another.
In fact, state school officials have already proposed the creation of regional school agencies that would assume the role now served by the county office.
“It doesn’t matter who runs it or what it is called, but there is a need certainly for the services that are provided through this office because they just must be done,” Lehman said.
“Eliminating this office does not eliminate the need for the kind of responsible monitoring and regulation of expenditures of public funds and the certification of teachers, the training and licensure of school bus drivers, the monitoring of the fiscal operation of school districts and so on.”
For more than a decade, the county office gained a reputation as an antiquated bloated bureaucracy more concerned with adhering to procedure and protocol than with serving a useful function.
School officials, for instance, would cite the way the agency would handle teacher seminars periodically held by school districts, insisting on reviewing every speaker and expenditure and keeping such a tight handle on purse strings for the programs that they would not let the teachers spend any money for coffee and doughnuts.
Much of the problem, school officials say, may have been not so much with the office as with Martwick, a former high school teacher who was viewed as reclusive and intractable.
With Martwick out of the way-he resigned last September-the will to totally eliminate all vestiges of the office could vanish.
Lehman is already implying as much, saying that there are some functions the office now serves that the state may have difficulty assuming.
For example, the office now handles some 18,000 applications for GED certificates a year, offering the tests, grading them and then issuing the diplomas for those who pass the exam. Lehman said the state may have difficulty taking over a GED program as large as Cook County’s.
And then there is teacher certification, the requirement that the credentials of teachers be reviewed annually and their teaching certificates renewed. Aside from renewing some 100,000 existing certificates, the office last year also processed applications from some 24,000 new teachers.
“To require teachers from the Far Northwest or Southeast Sides to make applications for their certificates to come downtown and to have 100,000 of them taking the elevators up to the 14th floor (of the State of Illinois Building) would strain beyond any good sense the capabilities of that office,” Lehman said. “So I think other arrangements will need to be made.”
The state is trying to make those arrangements now. A State Board of Education task force has been meeting for the last few months to hammer out how it will take over the duties of the office. State officials plan to make a presentation Thursday to a county panel that has also been looking into the matter.
But the wild card in all this is a proposal by the state board to create five regional agencies for the suburbs and one for Chicago that would assume the duties of the office. State school officials said they expect legislation to create the new agencies will be introduced in Springfield this spring.
Sue Bentz, an assistant superintendent with the state board who is overseeing the transition, conceded that forming the new agencies was an acknowledgment that the state was unlikely to take on all the duties of the county office.
But she said the state was still exploring what functions could be assumed, including teacher certification, which she believed the state was equipped to perform.
And then there are the jobs she said could probably be eliminated altogether. For example, there is still a little used law on the books requiring the county superintendent to issue a certificate before a teenager can take an after-school or summer job.
That is one duty, she said, that is not likely to be assumed by anyone.
