Leadership for Hire: How Consultants Took Over Lake Forest Schools

By Jeff Brincat, President, Parents Care

Imagine asking your local school district how many consultants they employ—and being told they can’t give you an answer because there are too many to count.

That’s not a joke. That’s precisely what happened when Parents Care submitted a FOIA request to Districts 67 and 115. The administration’s response? It would require extraordinary effort just to determine how many consultants are currently on the payroll.

Click the letter to read the administration's response.

This is what decades of unchecked spending and absent oversight have created: a bloated bureaucracy that hides behind layers of consultants rather than taking responsibility for its decisions.

Let’s look at the recent track record for some examples of how consultants took over Lake Forest schools:

• At Cherokee Elementary, outside consultants were brought in to address the chaos left behind by former principal Kate Cavanaugh.

• In District 67, the administration hired consultants to deal with the fallout after employing a staff member who was under active investigation for sexual grooming.

• And the communications department spent $20,000 on a consultant—just to help them create a survey asking parents how good of a job the communications department is doing.

And that’s just what they’ve proudly publicly announced in their newsletters. When we submitted FOIA requests to find out how many consultants have been hired over the past few years, the district replied that compiling the total would be “voluminous”—in other words, too massive to count without extraordinary effort.

 This is not a student-first school system.. This is an administrator-first school system focused on protecting itself.

While taxpayers face rising levies and parents demand answers, the district responds with PR campaigns, carefully worded statements, and consultant reports that go nowhere. Despite a massive administrative infrastructure, they still seem incapable of leading without help.

Let’s be clear: hiring consultants isn’t always wrong. But when consultant culture becomes the default response to every crisis, scandal, or PR stumble, it’s a sign that real leadership is missing.

But what does all this mean for families and homeowners in Lake Forest and Lake Bluff?

It means you’re footing the bill for the dysfunction—and it shows up in your property tax statement.

As we highlighted in our December article, “A $3.35 Million Tax "Gift" for Lake Forest Taxpayers,” Lake Forest residents pay among the highest property tax rates in the nation.

In fact, the average household in Lake Forest paid over $21,000 in property taxes in 2023—and a significant portion of that went to Districts 67 and 115.

These aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet. They’re direct hits to household budgets, retirement savings, college funds, and home values.

And yet, while residents shoulder that tax burden, the district:

• Can’t track its own consultant contracts

• Can’t solve persistent HR and leadership failures

• Can’t deliver across-the-board academic excellence—especially in core areas like reading and math

Instead of investing in the classroom, leadership has built a consultant-fueled bureaucracy that drains resources from students and families.

If you’re wondering why your tax bill keeps rising even as we trail so many of our neighboring school districts in academic performance—this is why.

Parents Care exists to advocate for transparency, student achievement, safety, and academic excellence. That begins with asking hard questions about how our money is being spent—and why a district with some of the highest per-student spending in the state can’t even account for its own vendor contracts.

We will keep asking those questions. And we will keep shining a light on systems that prioritize institutional image over student outcomes.

Because these are our schools, this is our community, and the taxpayers deserve better than a leadership team that needs a consultant to tell them what accountability looks like.