It goes without saying, but what happens in Springfield can have a profound effect on our local community. One important piece of legislation currently before the General Assembly is this.
You can get a pdf summary of the proposed legislation from the State Board of Education here.
You can review more details and even review the impact to financial school districts here.
Most of you probably just want to get to the highlights, so here they are:
- If you live in Urbana, you probably want to call Rep. Carol Ammons and Sen Scott Bennett and tell them to support this bill. Based on two funding scenarios providing the SBOE link, the Urbana School District will get an additional $1.1M-$2.2M in additional state funding.
- If you are living Unit 4, you probably want to call Rep Carol Ammons, Rep Adam Brown, and probably any other elected official you know. Without adequacy grants, the school district will lose between $6.2M and $8.6M every year. With adequacy grants, there is no change in school funding. Those adequacy grants are critical and were not included in the this bill’s predecessor, SB16.
After the Carle legislation, it is obvious that elected officials and their staffs sometimes need a reminder they need to be paying attention to important legislation. They need to watch for amendments and understand what type of impact those amendments might have on their constituents. I suspect Unit 4 is all over this, but losing $8.6M in state funding would be painful to say the least.