The Rest of the Story

Right after the end of the school year for students, the Huntley Education Association (HEA) held elections for new officers. The newly elected officers of the HEA are:


Kim Aschenbach (5th grade Conley) - Co-President
Julie (Lutter) Hunter (5th grade Conley) - Co-President
Mark Stahl (Heineman 7th grade Social Studies) - Vice President
Christy Henderson (Chesak Kindergarten) – Secretary
Chris Laird (Chesak 1st grade) - Treasurer

Why would the HEA hold elections right in the middle of contract negotiations? Because they had to... New officers are always elected after new bylaws are adopted.

The rest of the story:

Bongo has been sniffing around and has learned that for the last year and a half there has been some confusion and dissention in the ranks about what bylaws actually drive the group’s activity.

According to Bongo’s trusted sources, the HEA had been operating under very old and outdated bylaws for quite some time (1996, way before any of the Square Barn or Reed Road schools were built), so a while back a bylaws committee was formed. As a result of that group’s work, last spring (2007) a new set of proposed bylaws were presented, discussed, and approved by the HEA general membership… or so they thought.

The group operated under these new bylaws for several months without incident. At about the time the current contract negotiations were getting underway, some high school union members learned there weren't any high school employees involved with negotiations. Some of these people went to the union leadership and said they wanted the high school to be represented at negotiations, and assumed the issue would be brought up at a union meeting. But there were no scheduled meetings, in spite of the fact that the new union bylaws said quite clearly that monthly meetings were to take place.

When pressed further about the meeting issue, the high school teachers were told by union president Christy Henderson that the new bylaws were not valid and the group was still functioning under the 1996 bylaws, which did not require monthly meetings. Bongo is told that outside of this large group of high school union members, no one else in the union was told the new bylaws were invalid and that the 1996 bylaws were still in effect.

Bongo has some questions for Henderson:

If the new bylaws were invalid due to a technicality, why was the general membership not told of this information until after Henderson was backed into a corner about meeting requirements?

If the new bylaws represented the will of the union, when it was learned they weren't valid why wasn’t a proper vote then taken immediately?

When the information finally came out, why wasn’t it shared with the entire HEA?

Why were some HEA members left in the dark about which set of bylaws were valid?

Bongo smells a rat!

Was it purely coincidental that Henderson found out that the new bylaws were invalid at exactly the same time that she was accused of not following them? What do you humans think?

Stay tuned to learn why Henderson wanted so badly to be the new HEA secretary. Stay tuned to find out why it was so important to her that she be the one who is the keeper of the records.