Marcus Alexander, superintendent of the Pembroke school district in the central Illinois town of Hopkins Park along the Indiana border, said he’d like to see several changes to school lunch programs because “insulating mediocrity of performance and service, that has to go.

“I’m riding the wave with the rich,” state Sen. Patricia Van Peltsays in a promotional video that showed her talking to a crowd about becoming “marijuana millionaires.” Wakanna For Life is a multilevel marketing company and the subject of multiple consumer complaints, as the vast majority of those who paid to set up “dispensaries” have made an average of just $200.

In a statement released on Monday, DCFS wrote that effective immediately Governor JB Pritzker has lifted the indoor mask mandate, which includes day care settings.

The data show that Illinois schools retain Black teachers at the lowest rate of all teacher groups at 80.6% compared to an 87.6% rate for White teachers. The Learning Policy Institute shows that teachers of color boost the academic performance of students of color.

“I love it,” he said. “I’m so excited that we now have no indoor mask mandates. That we have no more school indoor mask mandates, and it’s all because the people of Illinois did the right thing throughout this pandemic and that we’ve been able to bring hospitalizations down,” he said.

House bill 4437 expands health care coverage to nearly 150,000 low income immigrants ages 19 to 54, who don’t have coverage through either the Affordable Care Act or Medicaid. The bill has a price tag of $271 million, but supporters say in the end it will save tax payers money.

A report by the Better Government Association revealed Pritzker’s trust bought stock in Centene Corp., one of Illinois’ largest Medicaid contractors in 2020, the same year his administration made several decisions that benefitted the company’s bottom line.

The state’s highest court also vacated a lower court’s temporary restraining order over the rule. On Monday, Pritzker praised that decision. “The result of which is, if we need to, if we see another variant that is making people ill, that we would be able to impose a mask requirement, but we don’t have any intention to do that now. Things seem to be pretty good.”

Illinois election law allows corrupt politicians to run for office after being convicted; Only politicians convicted of election fraud are prohibited from running for state office. State Rep. Curtis Tarver II has introduced a bill to correct that.

Residential construction permits per capita grew by 17.5% nationally in 2021, according to data released Feb. 17 by the U.S. Census Bureau. Illinois was far slower, coming in at 10.6%.

Illinois is one of only 13 states to apply sales taxes to groceries. While the tax on groceries is 1%, not the full state sales tax rate of 6.25%, surcharges on groceries when consumers in the vast majority of states avoid them are tough to swallow.

According to data released Feb. 17 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there aren’t as many jobs in Illinois as there are in 46 other states.

In addition to setting up the nonprofit Shield Illinois to disseminate the test to schools and businesses statewide, the university founded a for-profit company, Shield T3, with headquarters in Chicago and Urbana, to market the test beyond Illinois. Last year, that effort brought in $64 million in revenue for the university, says Bill Jackson, Shield T3’s principal officer and a former high-level executive at Johnson Controls. “It’s a viable business,” adds U. of I. president Timothy L. Killeen.

When government estimates show that the number of people experiencing homelessness in Illinois dropped 15% in 2021, and fell 16% in Chicago, housing advocates expressed some skepticism about the results. The counts, conducted by volunteers and fed to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, are used to allocate federal funding.

“Everything Pritzker announces between now and Election Day deserves additional scrutiny. He’s practically at the point where he can designate whatever policies he wishes, based on both the Democrat majority in Springfield and his own confidence that he’s right.”