By Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner
There’s only a few hours left to vote today and maybe you need to be convinced that it’s worth it. Here are five reasons you should head to the polls, especially to vote on your local school board candidates.
1. Only 20 percent of Illinois students are back to full in-class learning
School districts won’t open up more unless there are more board members willing to support reopening. Just 386,000 of Illinois’ more than 1.9 million students are back in class full time. The rest are still stuck with ineffective fully-remote learning or some degree of hybrid learning.
In contrast, private schools in Illinois are fully open. And in states like Texas and Florida, public schools are mandated to provide in-class learning, five days a week.
2. School districts make up a majority of your property tax bills
Illinoisans pay the nation’s highest property taxes, with about two-thirds of those costs generated by school districts. Residents will never get property tax relief until school district costs come down. And that requires bold school board members willing to fight for spending controls. Today, most board members support the maximum yearly increase in the levy, no questions asked.
3. Long-term contracts for me, but not for thee
The COVID-19 lockdowns have brought to light the major differences between public schools and private sector taxpayers in Illinois. School district employees have been protected throughout the shutdowns by long-term employment contracts, guaranteed pay increases and constitutionally protected pensions. The private sector – despite the massive pay cuts, job losses and uncertainty during the pandemic – had to pay for the full costs of those protections. North Shore School District 112’s five-year contract with 22% raises, reached right before the pandemic, is a typical example of how things work.
New school board members need to be willing to take on the automatic nature of that spending.
4. School districts continue to pile on more debt.
Illinois is known for having the nation’s worst pension crisis, but less well known is that Illinois school board members are burdening residents with another $22 billion in debt (not pension related).
That’s more than $11,000 in debt for every student in Illinois – and far more compared to neighboring states. Illinois has 47 percent more school debt than Iowa, 46 percent more than Wisconsin and 28 percent more than Missouri.
The amount of school district debt has almost doubled since 2002, growing to $11,201 from $6,085.
Illinoisans need more school board members that challenge the type of spending – in particular, expensive new buildings – that creates so much debt.
5. Districts continue to politicize the classroom
Illinois schools are being politicized, whether through state mandates like “culturally-responsive” teaching standards and mandated activist reading lists or local school boards agendas that push for a BLM curriculum.
School districts need board members that demand critical thinking return to the classroom and reject attempts at turning school children into political footballs.
Read more here:
- Illinois, spare us your ponderous ‘reopening guide’ for schools. For God’s sake, just open them.
- Politicizing the classroom: 9 things to know about Illinois’ pending ‘culturally responsive’ K-12 teaching mandate
- Appease the Chicago Teachers Union and this is what you get
- The $21 billion debt most Illinoisans know nothing about
- WalletHub, Tax Foundation confirm what Illinoisans already know: they’re overtaxed
With $162 billion more from taxpayers, couldn’t you deliver a few bond upgrades, too
Audio and summary 
A largely unasked question is becoming glaring: Is Illinois doing all it should to use artificial intelligence to make government cost less and work better? So far, the evidence says no.
I wish this article came out a week or two prior to yesterday. Then I would have remembered to call up the candidates and ask them some telling questions. So unfortunately we went into the voting booth without a clue of which board candidates were woke and which were normal. I went solely based on their surname nationality. Sadly, this makes me part of the problem I guess.
Yes, in a way, for sure, because the stereotypes that in nonpartisan races the white guy is the republican and the females are progressives can be wrong. That’s why woke is so awful – it incorrectly assigns values and belief to people based solely on their skin color or other self-identification traits.
https://www.journal-topics.com/articles/rally-celebrates-inclusion-rejects-gcan/ The lesson here is that if you go against the narrative, you will be targeted, you will be protested, you will be attacked, you will have hit pieces written against you. Don’t you dare go against BLM. The ‘target’ of the rally was not even a candidate but merely someone who supported candidates. This is one reason why few conservative candidates even dare run in our state. The opposition is organized, supported by all major institutions, and will cruelly destroy you. Rally Celebrates Inclusion, Rejects GCAN An estimated 120 people gathered behind Northbrook Village Hall to protest the Glenbrook… Read more »
Stop the Culturally Responsive Teaching. More indoctrination of our kids is coming if this isn’t stopped.
Democracy is two wolves 🐺 and one sheep 🐑 voting on what’s for dinner 🍽. Sorry to include pictures, but if you still believe in this system– if you still believe voting works, this website should be in multicolored crayon words with an occasional backwards R.
I believe individuals voting is the best system for electing politicians and as with any system has flaws and is more difficult than appears at first glance.
Conservatives need to be better organized, better funded, and have more and better 501c3 and 501c4 support structures, as just a few examples.
Teacher Unions back board candidates, always D, and throughout the NW suburbs, they won overwhelmingly.
That’s because that’s what the voters wanted. You continue to struggle with the majority choosing their elected officials. The constant denial by the far right of the GOP that claims election fraud will continue to deny Republicans a chance to win elections. The independents are turned off by this faction of the GOP more than they are turned off by the far left BLM mob. The far right rantings make for a very small tent.
This is not really true. The Chinese communist government says in their ‘elections’ that they respect the will of the voters too.
In IL, a small but vocal minority of people vote progressive and they bully and punish and cancel anyone who thinks or votes differently. They’ve hijacked the elections. Often in these cases few conservatives even run for fear of being ruined, over a stupid local school board position.
So is there really a choice when your opposition already controls all the power?
Trump won.
A Benjamin Franklin quote… Pure democracy is this chaotic and impractical, we have a republic that is decomposing into something with no checks and balance.
Most parents cannot name the words represented by DEI, have never read a board packet, nor watched a board meeting video or attended a board meeting. And in 100% of the school districts in Illinois where a teacher union is present (which is probably 98% or so of the districts in Illinois), the teacher union has more members and is better financed than its counterpart (the management alliance which often sides with the union anyways, plus a citizen group where one exists – and very few exist). The teacher union and PTA / PTO agree on just about everything. Instead… Read more »
yes, part of the covid coup is the destruction of public education. gauleiter prickter has suceeded in ruining public education and torturing our kids with fascist facebands and segregation, now injecting racist “equity” to destroy equality. Time to get out of the trenches and fight back if you have not been injected yet. if you have don’t get another injection, the goal is to keep injecting until you die. the fourth reich holocaust will be clean and profitable compared to the third reichs dirty and expensive death camps