D86 board president Richard Skoda.

If you thought the Tea Party crazies on the Hinsdale board of education are off the rails, things just got weirder.

The latest episode began when the teachers posted an article about the District 86 negotiations on their Facebook page.

The article was from a local online news site called The Patch.

As sometimes happens, a totally unrelated photograph from a totally unrelated article involving an unrelated axe imbedded in the dashboard of an unrelated car was included when the article was posted to the teachers’ Facebook page.

Naturally the board members concluded the axe was intended for them.

I mean, who wouldn’t come to that conclusion?

Even after the Patch officially took blame and apologized.

At a board meeting (The video of it is included with an earlier post) shows board president Richard Skoda screaming at teachers for laughing when he projected on a big screen the picture of the axe in the dashboard from the website.

As teachers explained to me, they weren’t laughing at the axe. They were laughing at Richard Skoda.

Admitting he didn’t know much about Facebook, Skoda kept yelling at the teachers to stop laughing.

This guy once was a teacher himself.

Talk about poor classroom management strategies.

I don’t know what was more amazing.

Skoda’s behavior.

Or how restrained the audience was.

Now Anne writes me this:



By the way, the school board has filed police reports against the people that “liked” the article and an investigation is underway. The board claims that the teachers cropped the photo and placed it with the link and that people were liking the photo. They called the teachers social media bullies. This all occurred despite the journalist taking the blame for the glitch. Also, keep in mind that the teachers several times posted that the photo was an error and then posted the link to the article that the Ax matched up with (of course they cropped the picture to only show what they wanted all to see). The board still said that the teachers were threatening them. I think that if anyone is the bully it is the D86 board who makes false claims despite contrary evidence and then harasses it’s teachers with bogus police investigations.

Filing police reports for a Facebook *like*?

Stop laughing!

As one teacher from Hinsdale told me, “This would all be funny, except this board is ruining our school district.”

Updated: I have received word from some folks that say that police reports were threatened but that the board may or may not have followed through with the threats. Of course, a police report is one thing. Actual police action is another.

Skoda and the board might want to step forward and confirm or deny that they filed police reports against teachers for *liking* a Facebook page.