Some Springfield kids will share their literacy coach when school starts this month.
Their family liaison, the one who used to know them by name in the hallway, will split their week between two schools. So will their “specials teachers,” who taught them to hold a paintbrush or keep a beat.
In Illinois, a child’s education still depends on where they happen to live, and this year in Springfield, that means fewer adults have room to catch a kid before they fall behind.
District 186 is cutting its literacy coaches from 20 to 13 in an effort to balance a $18.7 million budget deficit.
Jeanie Mack, a district structural coach, said a literacy coach is what keeps a school’s reading instruction from falling apart, meeting weekly with teachers to sharpen lessons and review how students are doing, and working closely with staff and principals to keep everyone on the same page.
Splitting coaches between sites will dilute their ability to do that, Mack said.
New state data on Evidence-Based Funding (EBF), explains why Springfield’s District 186 is not the only one having to make cuts to keep its schools open.
Illinois calculates how much money each district needs under the EBF formula passed by the legislature in 2017, then directs new dollars to the neediest ones first. Springfield School District 186 has only about 68 cents of every dollar it needs under the state’s own funding formula to adequately educate its students, a gap of roughly $67 million.
That failure by Gov. JB Pritzker and the Illinois General Assembly feeds directly into the budget crisis now unfolding, hallway by hallway, in Springfield’s schools and classrooms across Illinois.
The Illinois State Board of Education data found that overall the state’s school funding gap grew by more than $1 billion in just a single year and is now at $6.9 billion. That means about five out of every six Illinois students attend a school system the state itself considers underfunded.
Nearly 78% of Illinois school districts are below full funding. In Waukegan, Rockford, Elgin, Chicago, Aurora, Peoria, Kankakee, Urbana, Danville, Quincy, Springfield, Belleville, Carbondale and Marion, schools fell farther from full funding this year than they did last. Lawmakers wrote a target into the EBF law, 90% adequacy for every district by 2027.
Instead of closing that gap, Gov. JB Pritzker and the Illinois General Assembly continue to lose ground on their own legal requirement to adequately fund public education by 2027.
Springfield’s own budget crisis sits inside that statewide failure. The district is under a three-year state deficit reduction plan that requires a balanced budget by 2028, and this year’s nearly $10 million in cuts, on top of staff displacements already underway this spring, are part of that reckoning.
The district’s fund balance, its cushion for hard years, has shrunk by more than $40 million since 2023. Last year, the board cut $3 million just to keep the doors open. District documents point to rising transportation, insurance, and salary and benefit costs as key drivers of the gap, with federal dollars falling and EBF funding flat at best.
Every year Illinois underfunds EBF, District 186 loses revenue it would otherwise use to cover those rising costs. When schools do not have enough resources, students pay the price through fewer educators, larger classes and fewer support services.
Gov. JB Pritzker and Illinois lawmakers continue to invest only the statutory minimum of $350 million a year in new Evidence-Based Funding, even as the cost of reaching adequacy climbs further out of reach.
At that pace, full adequacy is now 14 years away, up from 11 years just last year. A child starting kindergarten this fall will finish high school before the state catches up.
Right now, in Springfield, the state’s failure to fully fund public education looks like a shared literacy coach and a family liaison stretched between two schools.
Gov. Pritzker and the Illinois General Assembly should convene a special session and treat Illinois’ education funding crisis as the statewide emergency it actually is.
This is ultimately about lawmakers at the state capitol giving students across Illinois the money that was already promised to them, so no kid has to share the one person who could catch them before they fall behind.
Pankaj Sharma is Secretary-Treasurer of the Illinois Federation of Teachers and President of the North Suburban Teachers Union IFT AFT Local 1274. He teaches history and government at Niles North High School in Skokie.
This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: Springfield schools are underfunded, and they’re not alone | Opinion
Reporting by Pankaj Sharma, Special to The State Journal-Register / State Journal-Register
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Pankaj Sharma, Special to The State Journal-Register | USA TODAY Network
