URBANA — The Illinois General Assembly’s spring session has come to an end.
State lawmakers passed dozens of education bills. They also left hundreds more on the table when they wrapped up this past weekend.
Which bills are most likely to impact students?
The state budget, Senate Bill 2510, is the most important bill that passed. It includes a smaller increase for grade and high schools than many education advocates wanted.
Those dollars will be distributed through the state’s Evidence-Based Funding formula, which assesses the gap between the resources school districts have and the costs of services their students receive.
“I think that this budget was probably as good as we were going to get in a tough year,” said Advance Illinois President Robin Steans.
Advance Illinois is a bipartisan education nonprofit organization. The group has a long list of important bills on issues varying from teacher shortages to kids missing school regularly to data on early education.
Steans said that while creating an Early Childhood Integrated Data System may not sound like the sexiest topic, Senate Bill 406 is one of the most important bills that passed.
“The truth is it’s a very big deal. Though we’ve been at it for years, we still find it difficult as a state to get an unduplicated count of what children are using what services.”
Steans said the data dashboard will allow the state to know where to put limited resources and understand the impact of those resources.
Some bills respond to Trump administration actions
Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker and the Democratic supermajority in the General Assembly have been vocal in opposing President Donald Trump’s vision.
One of Trump’s first actions in January was to allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to go to schools and other “sensitive” areas to deport students and families, in a break from past practice.
Safe Schools for All, House Bill 3247, prohibits school districts from excluding students based on their immigration status. It also requires schools to seek consent from parents for law enforcement to access their child at school for immigration enforcement, except in cases where a judicial warrant or subpoena prevents that.
Steans said the goal was to help parents know it is safe to send their students to school.
“In the wake of some of the federal actions and ICE actions, we’ve seen attendance take a significant hit, because there are students and families that are concerned about sending their children to schools and whether or not they might be exposing their children or the parents to hostile action,” Steans said.
Pew Research Center estimates 7.7% of K-12 students in Illinois have a parent who is in the United States without legal status.
What were Republican priorities this session?
Some of the bills the Republican causes focused on during the spring session aligned with Trump’s agenda. For example, House Bill 1117 required athletic teams to be all boys, all girls or co-ed, based on assigned sex at birth. Those bills did not get very far.
Metro East Representative Amy Elik is the Republican spokesperson for the House Education Policy Committee. She said the biggest issue the committee saw was the Homeschool Act. House Bill 2827 would have required families to register with their regional superintendent that they are homeschooling their child, to prevent abuse and educational neglect.
“It was the most engagement I have seen in my five years in the legislature, from people throughout the state who said, ‘Hands off homeschooling. We shouldn’t be bearing the brunt of the bad, bad cases where [the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services] has failed to investigate homes for neglect.”
Some Democrats joined Republicans in opposing the bill, and the Homeschool Act did not pass.
Elik also supported some Democratic-led bills that she said were commonsense, like the state developing an in-house version of a teacher preparatory exam.
Some bills that didn’t pass may resurface in the future
Some widely publicized bills did not pass this session including a ban on cellphones in classrooms that Pritzker was pushing for.
A large coalition of lawmakers, education advocates and state universities have been working for years to craft a similar formula for higher education as the Evidence-Based Funding formula for grade and high schools.
In late April, the University of Illinois System came out in opposition to the result, Senate Bill 13 or the Adequate and Equitable Public University Funding Act, which would distribute new dollars to state universities with the highest need.
“As the process moved forward and the model took shape, it became clear that there were fundamental differences in perspective around how the formula should be constructed and what metrics should drive state investment,” University of Illinois System Assistant Vice President of External Relations Jennifer Creasey said in an email.
University of Illinois System’s calls to action to oppose Senate Bill 13 say cuts to higher education would disproportionately fall on its shoulders. About 2,600 people responded to that first call to action, by the university’s count.
Advance Illinois supports the equitable funding bill. Steans said the University of Illinois System does better under the formula than now, because the goal is to invest more in higher education.
“If and when we pass this, I think that the General Assembly will be doing it with the intention to stay true to that, much the way they have stayed true to putting new dollars in the evidence-based formula in K-12 for the last eight years,” Steans said.
Even if the state does not increase funding and keeps the allocation flat, no university would get less than it currently gets. Cuts would impact U of I more, because U of I has significantly more cushion from other funding than any other university.
Urbana Representative Carol Ammons introduced the House version of the bill.
“Our regional institutions, I don’t know if they can weather the storm of the Trump administration to be honest. It is going to require the state of Illinois to step in as much as possible,” Ammons said.
She also said Illinois does not have the ability to replace all federal grants.
“We can do these kinds of measures that provide equitable distribution, so that students who need more resources in regional institutions like Western and Eastern Illinois University, those students will get the same access and allocation and resource availability that is at our flagship university.”
Ammons added that she plans to work with colleagues and the University of Illinois to get more support.
Creasey said U of I supports equitable funding and will continue to do research and analysis to shape the funding model.