Rob Karr, President and CEO with the Illinois Retail and Merchants Association, said there are tons of operational questions when it comes to capacity limits as more Illinois residents become vaccinated. “The theory that you’re open and doing okay is just not accurate.”

CTU is already harnessing that power to push back against an April 19 start for the district’s high school students. While the district wants high school students in the classroom four days a week, the union wants students in the classroom just two days a week.

“Even though we provide resources to counties and local jurisdictions during times of disaster, we really never had a logistical arm to the organization. That has since changed,” IEMA Director Alicia Tate-Nadeau said. The agency is requesting an increase of $3.5 million in allocations from the General Revenue Fund.

To identify states whose economies were hit the most by the coronavirus, WalletHub used two key dimensions: “Highly Affected Industries & Workforce” and “Resources for Businesses to Cope Better with the Crisis.”

“In conjunction to all the stimulus checks that have gone out in the last six months, and the discussion of a fourth-round potentially going out, what is the incentive to actually work for a living,” one hospitality manager said.

“There have been a number of right-wing organizations that have stoked some of these lawsuits and they continue to try and poke and prod to find something and anything,” Pritzker said. “They’ve lost at every turn. This is just another one of those cases.”

Chicago officials have said that such universal eligibility will be expanded on April 19, but Pritzker said Chicago residents are “absolutely welcome” to sign up for appointments at the state-run vaccination sites. But Pritzker also urged not to expect to get an appointment immediately.

A tax credit is providing scholarships for Illinois’ low-income and minority students, but Gov. J.B. Pritzker is targeting the program that lets them thrive when public schools are a poor fit.

State supreme courts in Wisconsin and Michigan have now ruled their governors can not issue disaster declaration after disaster declaration as a way to impose mask and other mandates. At some point state legislatures are expected to debate and set those policies. But the practice continues in Illinois.

There were 14,189 new unemployment claims filed in Illinois the previous week.

Said Matthew Davis, chair of pediatrics at Lurie Children’s Hospital, “There’s no question that the isolation from other children, their peers, has been immensely disruptive to what we call social and emotional learning. That school interaction with other kids is part of healthy development.”

The essence of progressivism’s agenda is to create a government-centered society by increasing government’s control of society’s resources, then distributing those resources in ways that increase the dependency of individuals and social groups on government.

“Of course, Illinois isn’t out of the woods entirely.”