Just noticed the below job listed on the District 65 website (posted 11/25) and thought to myself, “Tom, it’s time to take a victory lap! You’ve done it. Transparency is finally going to rule the day. District 65 cares deeply about compliance with state and federal transparency rules!”

Upon further review, looks like they’re hiring someone to .. make dashboards? The top three job duties are building dashboards and doing work that is closer to what I would call Data Engineer or Data Scientist. I’ve spent time working in both data science and compliance and I’m not sure I’ve ever met someone capable of building data warehouses and also doing site visits for compliance.

Take some solace that the fourth and fifth bullet points on the job req actually involve doing boots-on-the-ground compliance work. Given the issues the District has had over the last few months with late teacher payrolls and delayed posting of statutory information to their website, it sounds like something the district needs.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen more dashboards solve underlying operational problems. Another $100,000+ going out the door in administrative headcount.

In other news, it’s been quiet here on the newsletter because I’ve been going through the steps to incorporate this little operation as an LLC. Finally finished the steps to that this morning! If you’d like to see those details, you can go FOIA it yourself. I do appreciate that my lawyer listed this as a “media/blog/podcast operation” - so I guess I’ll have to start a podcast.

Thanks for reading this newsletter and stay tuned; good stories on the horizon.