Lloyd Lehman died last week. You probably didn’t know him, but you might have voted for him. He was the Cook County regional school superintendent.
The odd thing is, nobody can figure out how to replace him.
If the mayor dies, the City Council chooses a new mayor. When an alderman goes to jail, the mayor plucks out somebody to take his job.
But the best government lawyers have pored over the law books, and they can’t figure out how to replace Lloyd Lehman.
This might be cause for worry if anybody really needed a Cook County regional school superintendent. But nobody does. It is the most useless job in local government.
So nobody can figure out how to fill a job that nobody needs.
Are you getting the drift of this?
In 1991, the legislature actually got rid of the job. It was held then by Richard Martwick, whose chief qualification was that his brother was a Democratic committeeman. If you were a teacher in Cook County, every year you sent $4 to Martwick, and Martwick sent you a new teaching certificate.
There are 45 regional school superintendents around the state, all pulling down nice paychecks, all propping up bureaucracies, all going through the motions every few years of holding elections to keep their cushy and very relaxing jobs.
But they do nothing that couldn’t be done by somebody else.
Martwick did worse than nothing. Millions of dollars for schools passed through his office, and he stuck the money in a politically connected bank that didn’t pay interest. And he used whatever power he could muster to bully the suburban schools.
The suburbs hated Martwick, but the Chicago Democrats kept him in office.
One of the best things Richard Phelan did as Cook County Board president was to persuade the legislature to do away with Martwick’s job. And in 1991, the legislature voted to do just that.
But then Phelan made a mistake. Martwick quit, and Phelan chose Lloyd Lehman, who was then an obscure state education bureaucrat, to step in and dismantle the office.
Lehman was a decent man, but he found out he liked this job. So he lobbied to keep it. And the Republicans realized, after they had voted to eliminate the job, that they had missed a great opportunity to grab some patronage in Cook County.
So the legislators voted to save the Cook County regional school superintendency, even before it went away. They rushed through a law that said only suburbanites would vote for the office, so the Republicans could be sure to elect a Republican.
When you’re in a hurry to make laws, you can get sloppy. The Republicans got really sloppy. The first law said the office would be abolished in July 1994. But the second law said it would be recreated in August . . . 1995.
Oops. For 13 months the office disappeared. Nobody missed it at all. But sure enough, the next August, the very patient Lloyd Lehman went back to, uh, work.
Around that time, a friend of mine went looking for Lehman. She needed a teaching certificate and he was the only person who could give it to her.
She sent a registered letter to the Cook County regional school superintendent. It came back marked, “undeliverable, no forwarding address.”
She called the telephone operator to find his office number. It wasn’t listed.
She called staffers of the State Board of Education, hoping they could track him down. They never called back.
I finally found him, working out of a little office he was given at Riverside-Brookfield High School.
For the last few years Lehman had toiled at the job nobody needed. Teachers sent him four bucks. He sent them a teaching certificate.
And then he died last week.
That’s when everyone discovered another problem. The law didn’t say anything about what would happen if the office was vacant.
So nobody can replace Lehman. At least, legally nobody can replace Lehman. His assistants still are busy taking in the checks and sending out the teaching certificates.
And what are the people who created this mess doing? Some legislators are talking about rushing through an emergency bill to give somebody the power to replace Lehman.
Here’s a better idea. Take your time, think this out, and then dump every regional school superintendent in the state. They spend a lot of money and nobody needs them.
The education bureaucrats say these superintendents are vital, essential people.
Well, here’s one last example of how vital and essential they are.
In Tazewell County the regional school superintendent is Tom Wojtas.
Right after Wojtas was elected, he searched high and low for just the right educator to be his assistant regional school superintendent. He wanted just the right assistant to cash the $4 checks and lick the stamps to send out the teaching certificates.
And after searching high and low, he hired his wife, Joy. Tom makes about $80,000 a year. Joy makes about $72,000. At $4 a crack, it takes 38,000 teachers’ annual dues just to pay Tom and Joy.
The legislators had a great chance eight years ago to do something out of character: Get rid of an expensive and useless bureaucracy. But they just couldn’t bring themselves to do it.
Now’s the time to get it right.
