Brought to the Illinois senate floor on Jan. 9, 2013 by Senator John J. Cullerton and currently making its way through the house of representatives, Illinois Senate Bill 16 is poised to change the way school funding is done in Illinois.
The bill itself seeks to create equitable and more transparent education funding in Illinois, redistributing funding so that all schools will be supported primarily by property taxes and state funding going primarily towards schools with a higher number of disabled, impoverished, and gifted students.
Last July, state legislators were recommending ways to improve public education funding in Illinois, which has remained unchanged since 1997. The result was the creation of Senate Bill 16 (SB16).
Ron Sandack, Representative of District 81, has two children. Both attend DGN, one is a senior and the other is a freshman.
“Taking money from one underfunded school to give to another terribly underfunded school is not progress; it could have a negative effect on all aspects of education,” Sandack said.
Marcus C. Evans Jr., Representative of District 33, is from the south side of Chicago where schools have lower property values.
“We want a better Illinois student to become a better employee. We need people to succeed and be the next business owners. SB16 is doing something that hasn’t been done before, this is a new idea,” Evans said.
The current system has the state’s funds being the primary support behind many schools with property taxes typically making up 40% of a school’s funds.
It has also led to situations in which higher achieving and wealthier schools are more likely to receive extra funding than lower achieving poorer schools. According to non-profit government watchdog illinoispolicy.org, in 2013, a majority of more than $500 million in special state education subsidies related to property wealth went to just 40 of Il’s 102 districts – all in Cook County and its collar counties. Chicago’s take of the total was more than $280 million. In contrast, downstate districts received just 3 percent of the $500 million.
According to District 99 controller (the person largely in charge of financial decisions) Mark Staehlin, at DGN 84 percent of funds come from property taxes, 7 percent of funds come from state sources, 3 percent from federal sources, and 6 percent from other local sources.
On Sept. 18 District 99 superintendent Mark McDonald sent out on an email to the DGN student body concerning Il Senate Bill 16.
“The new bill would reduce the funding we receive from the state by 77 percent. This translates to our losing over $3 million per year, or about $596 per student,” wrote McDonald.
If the 77 percent figure is accurate, and assuming the 7 percent of funds received from the state are split evenly between DGN and DGS, DGN could stand to lose approximately 1.6 percent of its current funds.
Despite the cuts in state funding, plans are being made to minimize its effects on DGN. According to Mark Staehlin in an email interview, the loss in funding would be managed by a restructuring of various debts, loans, and taxes.
“One of the many possibilities we would need to analyze would be the restructuring of debt that we are currently paying for out of our Operating Funds. Over the last 8 years we have been completing some major capital outlay projects by issuing debt that we repay using Operating Funds. We could have issued a different kind of debt that would have increased the taxes our property owners pay each year – but we didn’t because we wanted to keep our tax rate as low as possible. We could issue new debt, to be paid by new taxes to our property taxpayers, that would pay off and replace the debt being absorbed by our Operating Funds. Then the money we are spending from our Operating Funds could be used to help offset some of the proposed loss from SB 16,” wrote Staehlin.
“My goal is for people to become knowledgeable about SB16 and then join in the conversation with their state senator and representative,” wrote McDonald in an email interview.
Bruce Tanlim| News Editor
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Ashia Hanes | Staff Writer
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