Madeleine Doubek of CHANGE Illinois: “If the lawmakers in the Democratic supermajority intend to use the ACS 2019 one-year estimate, it undercounts the Illinois population by 140,687 people. If lawmakers intend to use the ACS 2019 five-year estimate, it undercounts by 41,877 people.”

Jim Dey: “There is no more important issue for legislators between now and the May 31 scheduled adjournment date, because redistricting is all about them and their ambitions.”

Senate Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford said the “culturally responsive teaching and learning standards” underlying the bill she sponsored are “about creating a learning environment in which students from all different backgrounds feel included and engaged…This is about professional development and making sure we began to address the teacher shortage, the lack of supports that we give to new teachers, new principals, and so that they have the mentorship that’s needed.”

Three Chicago colleges — Columbia College Chicago, DePaul University and Loyola University — have announced they will require students to be vaccinated against COVID-19 before the fall semester begins. There is as yet no statewide policy requiring college students to get vaccinated.

Pritzker’s plan incorporates some elements of the other already-proposed measures, including ending an energy rate formula lawmakers approved in 2011. The proposal would also phase out coal by 2030, and end natural gas use by 2045.

“What I want to say is, the gerrymandering train is on the tracks,” Senate Republican Leader Dan McConchie said. “It is moving ahead and Gov. Pritzker has considerable power as the chief executive to make his candidate promise a reality.”

“Folks who made money during the pandemic did very well during the pandemic, in fact,” Pritzker said Tuesday. “We want them to be able to step up and be able to pay the bills for the pandemic.”

State Rep. Joe Sosnowki’s demand was met with applause in the House chamber Wednesday. “This is a governance issue, this is a leadership issue, this is not a political issue,” he said.

State Rep. Michelle Mussman was the sole sponsor of the bill, and called it for a vote on April 22 just after 11 p.m. “We have a plan that can work effectively for the concerned parties and allow parents, students and staff to feel that they are returning to safe and healthy learning environments.”

Both parties have abused the mapmaking process when they were in power to benefit their parties by squeezing out opponents and keeping their incumbents safe. The results have been that in the 2018 election, nearly half of the Illinois House of Representatives seats were uncontested. In the Illinois Senate, 20 of 39 senators up for election faced no opponent.

“I don’t believe that the pool of qualified people grew,” said Mark Klaisner, president of the Illinois Association of Regional Superintendents of Schools. “I think we’re going to see exactly the opposite in the summer of ’21.”

Under a new bill (HB 3914), all references to affirmative action under Illinois law would be changed instead to be called “positive actions.”

The anticipated appeal would continue Pritzker’s efforts to toss aside decades-long review of federal oversight, intended to reduce instances of allegedly politically motivated and unfair hiring practices at various state agencies under the governor’s supervision.

The $80.5 million project, funded by Gov. JB Pritzker’s bipartisan Rebuild Illinois capital improvement program, will replace the 1970s-era central computing facility at College and Adams streets in the Capitol Complex, according to the Capital Development Board.

HB 2789, passed along party lines, adds an amendment to an existing law, which will grant sole authority to determine whether, when, and under what conditions public and private schools can return to in-person instruction in the event of a public health crisis to the Department of Public Health Powers and Duties.

Justin Williams of the Metropolitan Planning Council says the state needs to be ready to act as soon as any money is available. He says funding from Congress would make a big dent in the problem – and he wants government at every level to come up with a plan.

While the U.S. Census Bureau previously estimated Pennsylvania’s population exceeded Illinois’ in 2017, the official census count confirmed there are more Pennsylvanians than Illinoisans.

A 2019 complaint filed by an Illinois public school teacher led to a finding that as part of a year-long course on equity and diversity, seventh- and eighth-graders participated in a white privilege awareness exercise that required them to remain “in silence” and with “eyes lowered” as they responded to a facilitator’s prompts. About a dozen lawsuits and administrative complaints have been filed since 2018, with another wave planned this summer by conservative public interest law firms and private attorneys. The common thread of these legal challenges is the inescapable logic that making accommodations for critical race theory will erode

“Politics is ‘brutally hard—it’s nasty, it’s dirty and ugly,’ he tells me in our first discussion, at the end of December. ‘There’s a big sacrifice. I lost 22 pounds and most of my hair in the four years. The stress level—worrying about the well-being of twelve-and-a-half-million people all day every day while the press is kicking the stuffing out of me every day and my enemies are trying to kill me every day—oh my goodness, it was hard. But I loved most of it—I mean, 80 to 90 percent of it I loved.'”

Pritzker and other Democrats have melded their definitions of “fair” and “unfair” maps in the last few months, saying whatever maps get approved for the next 10 years must reflect Illinois’ diversity, and follow both the federal Voting Rights Act and Illinois’ similar state statute.

Gov. JB Pritzker mocked critics for using previous Census bureau “estimates” that mistakenly foresaw Illinois losing a quarter-million or more residents. Pritzker pointed to “carnival barkers, people who’ve run down this state for years, who have said … we’ve lost hundreds of thousands of people over the last ten years. As it turns out, it’s about 7,500 people.”

A resolution filed by state Rep. Joe Sosnowski calls on the Illinois Department of Employment Security to reopen employment offices across the state that have been shut down since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. “At this point, there is no justifiable reason why essential government services like those provided by IDES cannot resume in-person to serve working families whose livelihoods have been impacted by the pandemic.”