Feb. 18--The head of Illinois' second-largest school district said Wednesday that he was cautiously optimistic after Gov. Bruce Rauner's budget speech called for a full funding of state aid to districts for the first time in seven years.
But School District U46 CEO Tony Sanders said the speech was short on details for exactly how Springfield would fully fund state aid to foundation level when lawmakers haven't been able to do so in the past.
"I wonder where they're going to come up with the funding," Sanders said. "Unless I missed it, I didn't hear how he was going to pay."
Rauner on Wednesday said that fully funding state aid was a first step toward reforming the school funding formula.
"Our current formula doesn't meet the needs of our children," he said. "Past attempts to fix the formula didn't work because they pitted communities against each other."
Sanders said the speech doesn't address the inevitable inequity at the heart of state funding, a system that harms poorer districts.
The sprawling, three-county U46 district educates about 40,000 students, with state data showing about 62 percent of students classified as low income.
State law requires that $6,119 be put into the state aid fund for every student annually, Sanders said, but the fund has not been fully paid into for years now, resulting in U46 getting less money.
Just this year, the district lost $397 per student, he said, about $15.8 million in a district that has increased class sizes, canceled middle school athletics and taken other cost-saving measures in recent years.
Reductions in state aid particularly harm poorer school districts, who cannot fall back on property taxes to prop up their bottom line.
Rauner said he would work on bipartisan reform of state education funding, but called on lawmakers to make sure they send him a stand alone education appropriation bill for the coming fiscal year.
Sanders said the state needs to address other fiscal matters that bleed into the classroom as well.
Cuts to social services due to the state's budget impasse affect U46 kids outside the classroom, he said, and that impact is felt when they get to school.
"It is great that he wants to fund K-12 education, but there are other needs in the state that need to be dealt with also," he said.
At the same time, Sanders said he does not know what the district will do if the General Assembly fails to send an education bill to Rauner's desk.
In the past, administrators would wait and then a budget would pass as the end of the fiscal year neared on May 31, he said.
"But this year especially, we've been wondering about whether the state is going to have a budget for school districts for the next school year," he said. "What do we do? Do we open and operate for two months and then run out of money?"
Sanders visited Springfield Tuesday as part of the Funding Illinois' Future coalition, which seeks changes to the state aid formula.
The coalition members urged the House Education Funding Task Force to start fixing the system at the task force's first hearing.
Current state aid does not provide poor districts with an equitable amount of funding, according to the district.
This has resulted in scenarios where wealthier districts can spend $30,000 per student annually via the aid and more property tax revenue, while the poorest can barely spend $6,000 per student.
While education funding has long been a prominent issue in Springfield, little action has been taken to adjust state aid for schools.
Any reform brings with it some difficult political terrain. Better-off districts don't want to see their often already-small state share cut as lawmakers try to boost funding for poorer schools, a concept known as being held harmless.
It remains unclear if suburban Republican lawmakers with wealthier school district constituents would get behind reform in an election year when all House seats and two-thirds of the Senate are up for grabs.
geoffz@tribpub.com
