By Cynthia Grau/WJEZ News
Last week, Governor Bruce Rauner called a special session on education reform in Springfield, with no real resolution happening by the end of the day Friday.
State Representative Tom Bennett vented some frustrations with what was happening last week.
“Earlier this spring, the House and Senate passed Senate Bill 1- A bill to enact a new school funding formula. Unfortunately, while it has many good points, it includes a bailout of Chicago School’s public pension system. In total, even though Chicago only has 19 percent of the state’s students, they would receive 64 percent of the new funding in this bill. Including the bailout in this bill would mean half a billion dollars of education funds would not go to our local public schools, but would instead, go to Chicago. Governor Rauner said last week he’d like to strike that section out of the bill and deal with it separately, while putting the new education funding formula in place. Doing it that way would mean more funding for our local schools. However, Senate Democrats put a procedural hold on the bill and refused to send it to the Governor for action for two months,” Bennett said.
Senate President John Cullerton said he was sending the education reform to the governor today.
