Fat-Salaried Latina Nannies Ban Home Lunches: Little Village Academy Administrators Salaries Listed

Little Village Academy Nanny-in-Chief Elsa Carmona

Elsa Carmona, the $128,000 a year Principal of the Little Village Academy on Chicago's Southwest side pusillanimously hung up on WLS radio talker Cisco Cotto this morning when asked to explain her new dictate against parents packing lunches for their own kids.

Apparently she couldn't take the heat emanating from her lunchroom kitchen.

That's right, the nanny-in-chief of the Latino public grade school says she knows better than parents what their children should ingest. She has banned parents from packing lunches for their own children.

"Nutrition wise, it is better for the children to eat at the school," Carmona said. "It's about the nutrition and the excellent quality food that they are able to serve (in the lunchroom). It's milk versus a Coke. But with allergies and any medical issue, of course, we would make an exception."

It wouldn't be about being able to collect the cash-per-pupil that the Federal government doles out to each school for involvement in the school lunch program, would it?

Carmona wouldn't stay on the phone with WLS long enough to answer that question.

But the administratively top-heavy Little Village Academy needs as much cash as it can get its grubby paws on to pay the fat salaries that lavishes upon its army of administrators.

In addition to the $128k in tax dollars that Carmona pulls down it shells out another $600k+ for fatcat administrators.

Here are the Little Village Academy's grammar school administrators salaries as gleaned from the Better Government Association salaries database:

Elsa Carmona - Principal - $127,946
Evangelina Covarrubias - Asst. Principal - $98,188
Ingrid Murillo-Torres - Counselor - $58,269
Melinda Dahl - Literacy Coach - $95,407
Christine Hernandez - Bi-lingual co-ordinator - $71,512
Manuel Juarez - Tech co-ordinator - $71,713
Ned Perisic - Business Mgr. - $69,158
Lilia Gutierrez - Children's Welfare attendant - $31,430
Susan Salinas - Social Worker - $76,389

Put aside the moral consideration as to whether these outsiders should override crtitcal parent-child concerns and just ask, why are there so damned many of these nannies and why are they so extravagantly paid?

And especially why are they getting paid all that taxpayer cash to essentially turn out legions of CPS illiterates?

WLS's Mancow for Cotto = Cubs' Brock for Broglio

A few hours ago WLS 890 AM announced that it would replace super shock-jock, Mancow Muller, with former Moody Bible divinity student and traffic news reader, Cisco Cotto in its 9 to 11 am morning slot.

WLS station manager, Michael Damsky told the Chicago Sun-Times that the move was designed to give the station a more consistent conservative talk sound.

In that he certainly succeeded as the diminutive Bible thumper, Cotto is certainly more consistently dull.

To be sure, WLS thoroughly misused the flamboyant talents of Mancow by pairing him with the wearisome, middle-aged former WBBM-AM newsreader, Pat Cassidy. In fact the odd couple of the Chicago airwaves almost came to actual on-air blows on several occasions during their stormy year and a half together.

Cotto is the darling of the religious right-to-life mavens of the Illinois Review and certainly will provide a predictably conservative lead-in to Rush Limbaugh at 11 am. But Mancow may have provided the most incisive and witty libertarian-conservative critique of the Chicago Way ever to have been heard here. He once almost had leftist Congressperson, Jan Schakowsky in tears.

And with the exception of WGN's Garry Meier and WCPT's Jake Hartford (both of whom also were cut loose by the dour WLS), Mancow was the only genuine funny AM presence in Chicago.

The CST's media critic, Lewis Lazare, wrote that the sacking of Mancow was an attempt by WLS to shore up its flagging ratings among 25 to 54 year old adult listeners.

Oh, yea, this is going to work.

Just as it did for Cubs' General Manager, John Holland who in 1964 set out to shore up the Cubs shaky starting rotation by trading a young left fielder by the name of Lou Brock for an ailing right handed starter by the name of Ernie Broglio.

That season, Brock (whose talents were underutilized by the Cubs, much as Mancow's by WLS) sparked the Cardinals to a World Championship with 20+ steals and a .315 batting average.

That same year, Broglio posted a 4-7 record with a 4.04 ERA for the Cubs who finished a dismal 8th place in the then 10 team NL. He was out of baseball in a year and a half.

Brock, of course, went on to have a stellar career and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown in 1985.

I trust that Bruce DuMont has Mancow's niche ready at the Radio Hall of Fame at the Museum of Broadcast Communications on North La Salle St., because the nationally syndicated superjock will almost certainly end up there.

And Cisco Cotto can be hired to dust off Mancow's plaque and conduct tours.