Tim Blair, executive director for the State Employees’ Retirement System, said that they are in support of extending this program. “We do vouchers every other month and we have paid almost a quarter of a billion dollars to folks who have elected the COLA and the total buyouts. So we support this as a way to give our members options.”

House Minority Leader Jim Durkin called for the repeal of the Democrats’ sweeping criminal justice reform and police regulation law. “So they’re going to go down this process and say ‘we’re making minor changes, a couple of tweaks here and there,. But the fact is this thing is wrong, it’s dead wrong, and it’s going to set back public safety by decades if we don’t get this fixed this year.”

A decision is also still pending in a separate case heard this week where dozens of school staff are suing 22 schools over vaccine and masking mandates.

Ironically, many of the essential supplies that are needed to fight the virus – including PPE and home test kits – are produced by Illinois manufacturers, said Mark Denzler, president and CEO of the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association. “Whether its food or medicine or test kits, we have a very strong biopharmaceutical sector that is making a lot of the products that we need to get through the pandemic.”

Despite the Government Finance Officers Association recommending against the practice, a growing number of local governments have turned to issuing bonds to fund budgets strained by rising pension payments. Wheaton, Berwyn, Moline and East Moline all recently borrowed to pay for pensions.

“CTU has already demonstrated a willingness to strike over COVID-19 public health policy, despite the science, but its political agenda and negotiating tactics have been applied to much more. CTU has tried to negotiate its social agenda on housing, immigration, “restorative justice,” wealth redistribution and defunding the police.”

Nusrat Jahan Choudhury “would be the first Bangladeshi-American, the first Muslim-American woman, and only the second Muslim-American person to serve as a federal judge.”

During the meeting, some teachers raised concerns with the state board’s ability to enact the rule, saying that a vaccine mandate requires a bill passed by the state’s legislature. Other teachers said they want to be able to make a personal choice on whether they should take the vaccine or not.

The school board’s vote was unanimous; Theey argue the state doesn’t have the authority to remove recognition status and withhold funding from schools which don’t follow COVID-19 mitigations, such as mandatory masking. District leaders say they’ve exhausted all other options after writing to the governor’s office, ISBE, state superintendent, and Illinois Department of Public Health to advocate for localized mitigations.

State Rep. Sue Scherer introduced multiple teacher reimbursement bills during the hearing, all of which seek to address the statewide teacher shortage Illinois schools are facing. “I just don’t have the feeling that people are completely aware of how very, very serious our teaching shortage is right now.”

While riding my bike through the Northwestern campus on what must have been the first day of class, Fall 2021, I passed a long line of students wearing masks, outdoors, waiting to enter some building, or a residence hall. It wasn’t clear, but it was striking.

Young, healthy, presumably vaccinated, masked bodies standing in single file down a sad stretch of sidewalk at the end and the beginning of another sad year. It occurred to me as I passed them, and continued to pass them, loaded up with books, loaded up with bags, full of eager energy, that I was

The Center for Covid Control temporarily shut down all its sites earlier this month. The Rolling Meadows-based company is accused of billing the government for $113 million for tests provided to uninsured patients across the country, and many who actually had insurance.