School District 203: June 2008 Archives

Sure, of course you do. That stuff you read/hear about would never happen to you, because you monitor what your children do online. That's why there's no need for you to go to tonight's Internet safety meeting in Naperville for parents, right?

Let's do a quick poll: How many of your kids have MySpace or Facebook accounts? Ever had to order your kid to remove a photo from one of those sites? Ever consider they might be creating additional accounts and hiding them from you?

Do you let your child have a computer in his/her bedroom, with a web cam? That's just asking for trouble.

How about cameras on cell phones? It's becoming quite common for kids to take nude pictures of themselves or their friends and send them electronically to each other, as pranks, or sometimes to spite someone. Have you ever asked to look at the pictures stored in your kid's cell phone?

Just a few thoughts. Creepy predators using the Internet to lure kids is so 2004. Nowadays, it's more about how kids are using technology to embarrass themselves and their families.

Thanks to a Sun reader, we were alerted Thursday morning to 25 or 30 computer monitors dumped in a trash bin outside Naperville's Ranch View Elementary School.

Once we checked it out and verified the presence of the discarded computer materials, we wondered: If the monitors couldn't be donated to anyone, shouldn't they at least be recycled?

It turns out -- and we want to thank District 203 officials for being very helpful and straightforward in getting to the bottom of this -- that someone else likely illegally placed the materials in the school's Dumpster, a practice known as "fly dumping."

We saw this as an opportunity to inform people that because electronics equipment usually contains lead and other hazardous materials, it shouldn't be tossed in the trash. It should be recycled and kept out of landfills.

What do you do with your old electronics gear? Are there enough electronics recycling opportunities in the area to make it convenient for people to properly dispose of materials?

Monday's Sun features a report about the Illinois Teachers Retirement System. It's $22 billion underfunded. That's money the state owes it, but hasn't yet paid, because Illinois has a tendency to balance its budget the only way it knows how--by deferring mandated payments to retirement systems (the state also drags its feet reimbursing health care providers). Overall, the state's running a $42 billion deficit in pension funding.

TRS and teachers' unions say their pensions are not excessively generous, that only a few administrators get the golden-parachute deals we hear about. And that recent laws have curtailed excessive end-of-career raises that bump up retirement benefits. The average annual benefit TRS pays out is about $40,000 a year, or $3,344 a month.

What do you think? Is this entirely a state problem? Are teachers' pensions too low, too high or just right? What other laws should be enacted to curb abuses of the pension system?

(Editor's note: an earlier version of this entry incorrectly reported the amount of the state's TRS deficit.)