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Asia Tate, a senior at Hyde Park Academy High School and a student organizer with Southside Together Organizing for Power is celebrating the decision. “The police haven’t actually made our schools any safer,” said Tate. “Plus, research shows that when police are in the schools, students are more likely to go to jail.”
“And unless a case is made that the investment yields a long-term return for the taxpayers that we can justify in some way, I haven’t seen that yet,” the governor said.
The Illinois Birth Equity Initiative is a multi-pronged proposal aimed at promoting infant health while reducing the number of maternal and infant deaths. Gov. JB Pritzker has proposed: $5 million to a home visiting program for new parents; more than $4 million to create a statewide maternal health plan and distribute grants to community-based reproductive health care providers; a $1 million pilot diaper distribution program; and $12 million to create a tax credit aimed at low-income families with children younger than age three.
Proposed legislation aims to prevent insurance companies from using consumer information, like a person’s race, to set what he said are discriminatory auto insurance rates. During an Illinois House Insurance Committee hearing in Chicago Monday, Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias said an individual’s driving record should serve as the primary factor that is analyzed when setting rates.
The study from WalletHub shows the average American household spends $2,869 on property taxes for their homes each year, but researcher Cassandra Happe said it is much higher in Illinois. “The median home value is $239,100, and that comes out to $5,055 in real estate taxes every year,” she said.
At $52.7 billion, Gov. JB Pritzker’s spending plan for the fiscal year that begins July 1 would spend the most of any previous state budget. But documents from the governor’s office show the line item for Addiction Treatment, Prevention, and Related Services was $71.5 million for fiscal year 2024; for fiscal 2025’s proposed plan, that line item is $56.5 million. For Addiction Treatment Services, last year’s budget appropriated $107.1 million; for fiscal 2025, that line item is $85 million
The “sustainable community schools” model integrates additional student services coordinated by the school with outside organizations, such as housing or food assistance, medical or dental care, mental health services, English language or parenting classes. The district already has 20 sustainable community schools – 12 elementary schools and eight high schools – but most of them have lower proficiency and higher absenteeism rates than the district at large.
Iris Martinez, who is running for reelection this year, has touted her office’s follow-through on a long-delayed upgrade of the software underlying the court’s sprawling case-management system. “There’s been a lot of issues, and we’ve been communicating with [Martinez’s office] about them for quite some time,” Cook County Public Defender Sharone Mitchell said. “The worry is that it’s not getting better.”
Doctors and other health care providers accused by patients of sexual misconduct kept practicing – sometimes for years – because of gaps in Illinois laws and a licensing agency that can be slow to take disciplinary action. The providers went on to harm additional patients, in some cases, as their licenses remained in good standing with the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation.
“If there’s a city that should know that you don’t need to have a new stadium to be competitive as a baseball team, it’s the city where Wrigley Field is and where they’ve finally hung another World Series banner,” Center for Economic Accountability President John Mozena said. “There are very few things that economists agree on more than the idea that sports stadiums are a terrible investment for taxpayers.”
“ISBE’s own data demonstrates that 92% of Black and Latino students attend underfunded schools. This is unacceptable in a state that celebrates its school funding formula as one of the most progressive in the country. It is the state’s responsibility to be honest about the true EBF deficit and fulfill the 2017 promise to adequately fund every public school by 2027.”
Bucking a national trend in which Democratic incumbent centrists fight primary challenges from the left, one of the most progressive members of Congress, Rep. Jesús “Chuy” Garcia, faces 15th Ward Ald. Ray Lopez, a frequent Fox News guest coming after him from the right.
“In some cases, the defence of failure is breathtaking. Blue states such as Illinois have worked to all but eliminate charters, even as the Land of Lincoln boasts 53 schools where not one student can do grade-level math and 30 where none can do so in English. These schools are overwhelmingly in Chicago, where a significant increase in spending per student since 2019 seems to have made no impact. Yet Chicago’s failures are wholly representative.
Remember the biggest mansion tax of all, and who hates it. It’s the $10,000 cap on state and local tax (SALT) deductions that became law in 2017, and it’s mostly progressive lawmakers who opposed it then, fought to repeal it and are now working to let it expire.
The Illinois Department of Commerce said that of the $500 million proposal, $300 million would be earmarked for the quantum campus and $200 million would go to “matching federal grant opportunities,” but the governor’s office didn’t clarify how the proposed campus would differ from existing Illinois quantum research facilities at Argonne and Fermilab. It doesn’t even know where it wants to put the thing. “There are a number of sites currently under consideration — no decision on the location has been made,” a spokesperson from the Department of Commerce said.
“The board gave a victory to advocates of police-free schools, but the vote also antagonized, needlessly, the local school councils, elected officials and others who wanted to maintain the status quo of community decision-making.”
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