Springfield, IL (CAPITOL CITY NOW) – District 186 school board member Micah Miller (pictured, left) said Tuesday he is frustrated by the processes which delivered information about a bond issue “about a half hour or an hour before we are voting on the bonds.”

What’s more, said Miller “The optics look bad. especially when we are talking about deficit reduction and how we have to tighten our belt everywhere, but when you keep track of the math of what we have spent on projects, we never once had to say no to any of this. It’s just bond, bond, bond, and at some point, you have to bust out the calculator and pay attention to what we’re spending.”

“I think about optics every single day in this job,” superintendent Jennifer Gill said after the meeting, before explaining that money for school construction comes from a different pot than the money for operating the district. “But we also knew we have a plan that we wanted to get to, so sometimes you have to blend different types of resources together to make it work.”

The school board Tuesday voted to lay off – via “reduction in force” – probationary teaching assistants. That means the ones who have been on the job less than a year. Human resources director Jennifer Russell told Gill during the meeting that the plan is to rehire them before the next school year starts in August.