Dear Anonymous

Thank you for your comments. We appreciate you taking the time to read this blog. It means we are reaching all kinds of people to raise community awareness which has always been our intention, purpose and goal. In addition, when people leave particularly uninformed comments, our readership goes up, so thank you for making yesterday our highest traffic day in over six months!! We’ve had over 17,000 page views and we are growing larger every day.


We’d like to take this opportunity to educate you on some of the things we have done to help, promote, assist and work for the good of these entities. First of all, we attend many, many board meetings each month. By involving ourselves in our community, whether it is at the park district, PTA, school or village we are not sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that everything is hunky-dory. We are not here to contribute to the “fat, dumb and happy” mentality that permeates throughout our community. How many PTA, park board, school board and village board meetings have you been at in the last 24 months? Collectively, we have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours in board meetings, and we are not even sitting members on these boards. We take time away from our families to learn about and get involved in our community without compensation. Secondly, several of us have run for local governing boards such as school boards, village boards and park boards to make a difference. Running for office is not easy. It requires a great sacrifice. It takes time and money - time away from our families and money that many of us do not have to spare. We have volunteered at the schools, at the parks, for the PTA, and in various villages on a number of occasions.


About 18 months ago several of us banded together to form a team of community members that backed the Safe Routes to School Program. We spent many hours conducting meetings, writing grant proposals, tallying surveys, taking photos and creating slideshows to demonstrate the need for safety for the children of our community. It was through our hard work and dedication that the Village of Willow Springs was awarded nearly $400,000 by the State of Illinois to build sidewalks and implement other safety measures such as crosswalks and flashing traffic lights so that the children in our community can SAFELY walk to school. We’ve done a lot, but our work is not finished yet. There is much more to be done. So before you leave comments asking us to embrace these organizations, take some time to educate yourself on what we have done and will continue to do.


You want to talk about squeaky wheels? If we hadn’t squeaked our wheels and raised awareness that the Pleasantdale school district was seriously lacking in the area of technology, do you think our children would be benefitting from the Promethean Active Boards that now grace the walls of 48 classrooms in our schools? Certainly not! It wasn’t even on the horizon according to middle school technology director, Judith Stevens, when we spoke with her last March. Thanks to the squeaky wheels, the children in the Pleasantdale school district are now able to learn their lessons on cutting edge technology. Read some of our older posts to learn about other changes made and victories won as a result of our squeaky wheels.


This blog was started to raise community awareness and so that everyone’s voice would be heard. Our goal is to bring some measure of accountability and transparency to the local governments that are spending our hard earned tax dollars. Not just our tax dollars, but yours as well. We live in an area this is not adequately covered by the print media. A perfect haven, if you will, for wrongdoings to go on unnoticed. We cannot and will not sit by and pretend they don’t happen. Since we began this blog, we have heard and seen things that have raised many an eyebrow. The problem is people like you that want to sweep things under the rug and hope that no one will notice. Ignoring problems do not make them go away; smoke and mirrors will not hide them. When the dust settles, they will always remain.


Next time you wish to comment, please don’t hide behind the mask of anonymity. Come out of hiding and work hand in hand with us to make this the best community it can be.