CHICAGO – It’s up to local media to hold public school districts accountable for their use of public dollars.

It doesn’t happen often enough these days. Our recent investigations have revealed that hundreds of school districts across the nation spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on restaurant food and questionable travel. Yet when we search the Internet world for local stories about this topic, very little turns up.

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But a few local news outlets still go to the trouble to track local school spending and come across information that the public really needs to know.

That was the case in the Cicero, Illinois school district in 2016, when a Fox32Chicago team scoured the travel records of school board members and came upon some questionable expenses.

They found that one board member, Larry Dominick, turned in a receipt for a meal at the Rainforest Cafe at Disneyland in 2014 for a total of $147, while attending a conference in San Diego.

“On that same trip, he expensed a $356 rental car for a week and drove it 706 miles,” the news report said. “The conference lasted just three days.”

Reports also found that while at a professional conference in Boston, Dominick expensed an Uber ride to a spot close to Fenway Park, about an hour before a Boston Red Sox baseball game.

“FOX 32 also found Dominick and other school board members staying extra nights on the road, eating steamed lobster and crab and a $68 porterhouse steak,” the report said.

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The reporters discovered that Cicero board members also ran up hundreds of dollars in tabs for expensive hotels, meals and hotel parking at the Illinois School Boards Association Conference in Chicago – just eight miles from Cicero.

They could have attended the conference and slept and ate at home but obviously, they did not.

When FOX 32reporters asked school board President Tom Tomschin about board travel expenses, he said, “All our conferences are done in order to give us more education and to better serve the public.”

When they asked Tomschin why money was spent on hotels just a few miles from the school, he slammed his car door on them.

No more comment was really needed from Tomschin. The reporters did their jobs, and the citizens of Cicero came away with important knowledge about the misuse of their hard-earned tax dollars.