“There is no school where the budget is being adjusted unless the children are just not there — they are literally physically not in the building,” said district CEO Pedro Martinez. But advocates fear the cuts could undermine efforts to recover from the pandemic and thrust once-bustling campuses in neighborhoods such as Little Village into a cycle of staff and program cuts that trigger more family defections.
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.