Number of half-empty Chicago public schools doubles, yet lawmakers want to extend school closing moratorium – Wirepoints
April 19, 2024
18 Comments
A set of state lawmakers want to extend CPS’ current school closing moratorium to February 1, 2027 – the same year CPS is set to transition to a fully-elected school board. That means schools like Manley High School, with capacity for more than 1,000 students but enrollment of just 78, can’t be closed for anther three years. The school spends $45,000 per student, but just 2.4% of students read at grade level.
Hopefully, all media will get the message, in Illinois, too.
Ted joined Tom Miller of WJPF to talk about Illinois’ highest-in-the-nation property taxes, why lawmakers don’t want to touch the tax’s cost drivers, just how much Illinoisans’ tax burden has grown over the decades, why Gov. Pritzker failed to meet his promise to reform property taxes, and more.
Unless a member has a compelling hardship case why they need a small monthly check why not send the small IMRF pension checks out annually instead of monthly.
The “average pension is small” argument is the oldest yarn out there today. It’s usually an entirely misleading argument offered with no context, but this is one of the few articles that identify the reasons why one might have a small pension. For example, using BGA’s #’s, you’d see that, of the 23,000 TRS pensions under $20,000 in 2014: – Only 8% of those pensions are educators with 20 or more years of service – 40% of those pensions are educators with less than 10 years of service Just what type of retirement should one expect working 10 years? And… Read more »
The Southern Illinoisan article talks about how to handle small Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund (IMRF) pensions. So the how to handle small pension payouts problem could be extrapolated to all 19 pension funds, as there are 19 pension funds in the Illinois Pension Code. Two of those 19 pension funds, Downstate Police and Downstate Fire (Downstate being defined as every municipality outside Chicago) instead of being pooled funds are locally administered, ballooning the actual number of funds to around 675. Since Tier II pensions are for employees beginning their career on January 1, 2011 or after, for right now the… Read more »
OMG, Valerie Jarrett getting 35k/yr pension paid from age 50, for her part-time “work” on the City Council? With some COLA and immunized bond portfolio, that was worth 750k to 1M at age 50. I wonder how many years she ‘worked’ to get that net worth promise from the taxpayers? That is nothing short of legalized theft from the private sector taxpayers. Quite shocking……wait, make that ……quite typical of govt ees/decision-makers who have no respect for the private sector