June 17, 2017
The (Springfield) State Journal-Register
Illinois’ future dimmed by keeping the status quo
When a school district runs in a status quo operating mode, teachers teach, students learn, fans cheer for athletic teams and extracurricular activities expand minds.
It’s an operating mode officials at Springfield District 186, and other schools throughout Illinois, are unfortunately familiar with. Status quo is the best you can hope for when mired in the midst of a two-year state budget impasse, uncertain if you’re going to get promised funding.
Superintendent Jennifer Gill has led her team in in providing the best education possible for the district’s 15,000 students. But she noted the ability to innovate is challenged when the ground on which educators want to build an even-brighter future for students is unstable.
Yet the “status quo” is poised to continue if state elected officials again abdicate their duty to pass a full-year balanced budget when they return to the Capitol this week for a 10-day special session. We’ve given up on predicting what will happen under the dome, but the possibility looms of another stopgap budget that funds K-12 education. It happened last year because lawmakers aren’t stupid: Politicians know parents would riot if schools don’t open in August.
At first blush, a stopgap appears to be OK for K-12 education because schools receive basic state aid. But it does not fund categorical payments, money earmarked for specific purposes like transportation and special education. District 186 is owed $10.2 million in such funding, Gill said Thursday.
But a stopgap would be better than if a budget is not agreed upon by July 1, the start of the new fiscal year. If that happens, Gill does not expect monthly general state aid payments to come in; she estimates District 186 would start the 2017-2018 school year already $14.6 million in debt.
The state board of education has said districts must open and use whatever funds on hand until that’s depleted, Gill said, before operations would cease. She intends for District 186 to start the academic year, and for the staff to do the best they can for as long as they can to do right by Springfield’s future - the children who attend those schools.
Professionals like Gill have made the unconscionable two-year impasse created by the governor and legislators as bearable as they can for the most vulnerable Illinoisans. The sacrifices are there if you know where to look: Parents in rural school districts like Sandoval drive their students to athletic games because the district can’t afford to bus them. Some nonprofit social service agencies have said employees have worked for free because if they don’t, clients will not get desperately needed services.
It’s amoral. It needs to stop.
Illinois passed the crisis stage months ago and is in a full-on catastrophe. It is time to come together. To not do so is to admit Illinois can never hope for better than status quo. And that is not acceptable.
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June 17, 2017
The (DeKalb) Daily Chronicle
Looking forward to a new direction at NIU
What now?
That’s the critical question for Northern Illinois University in the wake of news that its president will resign effective June 30.
The way forward will be difficult, but it is not without promise.
Given the funding challenges higher education faces in budgetless, broke Illinois, being president of any university is not an easy task. We thank President Doug Baker for his efforts here in the past four years.
We also agree that he made the right decision in choosing to step aside. True to the often expensive nature of this administration, he received a buyout worth $600,000, through an agreement that appeared nowhere in public records before the NIU Board of Trustees meeting and wasn’t explicitly mentioned anywhere on their agenda.
It is this sort of dealing that the university must end if it seeks to forge a new path.
The culture of secrecy, the inclination by the university to bury and hide information from the public, should end with the next administration. So, too, should the search for loopholes and other ways to hire people at extravagant salaries to perform administrative functions.
Here’s our wish list for a new leader for the university:
. Someone selected through a transparent and open search process.
. A leader who will consider the needs of faculty and students in addition to adding to the administrative workforce.
. An administration that will not seek to hide or sit on important information - one that is not afraid to be accountable for its actions.
. A president who will consider not only the needs of students who live on campus, but also of the commuter student population, which is an important component of the student body at NIU and long has been.
Real openness can pay dividends with the community, the faculty, students and even lawmakers in Springfield, who will be happy to use any excuse they can to underfund the university - when they get around to funding it at all.
We hope the leaders on the board of trustees and interim President Lisa Freeman will consider the issues that have unfolded in recent months, and their root causes, and seek to avoid them in the future.
The university faces headwinds, to be sure. But it has a lot to offer students in northern Illinois, and its strengths often are overlooked. New leadership must be able to make a convincing case to counteract all those who would advise our state’s youth to leave the state to seek an education.
People in DeKalb County want NIU, its students and all those who work there to succeed. The institution is a source of community pride.
We look forward to a new direction.
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June 15, 2017
Chicago Sun-Times.
Cut a deal for Illinois in the no-blame zone
Let’s declare this a no-blame zone, if only for the space of this editorial.
And let’s go one better: Let’s declare Springfield a no-blame zone, if only for the next two weeks.
We don’t care, while in the zone, who’s responsible for the inability of our elected state leaders to pass a budget for the last two years, though their failure to do so is driving our state into the ground with unpaid bills, soaring debt and a junk-level credit rating.
Nobody in Springfield should care, either. Get over it.
We should all care about only this:
Gov. Bruce Rauner went on Facebook on Thursday to call a special session of the Legislature.
So get a budget deal done.
The governor’s leadership skills now are on the line. If he rides out of Springfield on his motorcycle on the last day of the session - his session - without brokering a deal, he will have failed miserably. If the Legislature skips town without a budget, they will have failed, too.
The no-blame zone will vanish in an instant, and the finger-pointing will explode. All the money and duct tape campaign ads in the world won’t convince the voters that Bruce Rauner has been anything but a disaster as governor, undeserving of a second term. All the talk from House Speaker Mike Madigan about how he’s just sticking up for the regular guy and those noble unions won’t get him a free apple for lunch.
And get ready, then, for the sorriest elections in Illinois history, with two sets of losers pitted against the other.
At this stage, agreeing to terms on a budget shouldn’t be that hard. House Republicans on Wednesday proposed a “compromise” budget plan, for the fiscal year that begins July 1, that looks awfully close to a plan approved in the spring by Senate Democrats. It’s like the clouds are clearing and you can see Indiana from the top of the Hancock.
The GOP plan calls for a four-year property tax freeze, while the Democratic plan calls for a two-year freeze. Split the difference and make it three.
The GOP plan also accepts an income tax proposed by the Democrats, to 4.95 percent from 3.75 percent, but for only four years instead of permanently, and beginning July 1 instead of being made retroactive to Jan. 1.
In a normal state, would such differences be insurmountable?
What we really don’t know is whether this special session is for real or for show. Is it an honest effort to pass a budget or a way to look heroic in failure?
Let the circus begin.
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June 14, 2017
(Arlington Heights) Daily Herald
Baseball shooter’s actions were perversion of views he espoused
Let’s start by recognizing that the Belleville man who shot five people at a Virginia baseball practice may have been a supporter of former presidential candidate and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders but he did not represent Sanders’ views.
Nor did he remotely represent the values of any reasonable American, regardless of party affiliation or political philosophy. His actions, in fact, were an affront to the fundamental values of freedom that the American political system upholds. He shot five people simply for their political beliefs, and but for the brave and rapid response of the Capitol Police, he might have killed many more.
That is not the act of an American patriot. It is not the behavior a person who understands or cares about the fundamental underpinnings of American political philosophy.
Nor, it is important to add, were the actions born of patriotism or representative of the values of President Donald Trump when a man walked into an Olathe, Kansas, bar last February and shot two Indian immigrants after shouting “get out of my country.”
Nor were the actions of a Ravenna, Washington, couple representative of conservative former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos when they stormed through a crowd at a Yiannopoulos speech last January looking for trouble, pepper spraying and shooting an anti-Yiannopoulos demonstrator.
Indeed, in all these cases and, oh, too many more, it is far easier to identify what the perpetrators don’t represent than what they do. For those of us whose overriding concern is the health of our society and the protection of innocents, understanding this truth is the first step toward a constructive reaction to these horrifying misdeeds. When we remove the deviants from the philosophy they claim to espouse, and only then, we can begin the relevant search for answers to the anguish they unleash.
In his response to the Virginia shootings, President Trump was as clear as anyone in addressing this point.
“We may have our differences, but we do well in times like these to remember that everyone who serves in our nation’s capital is here because, above all, they love our country,” he said. “We can all agree that we are blessed to be Americans, that our children deserve to grow up in a nation of safety and peace, and that we are stronger when we are unified, and when we work together for the common good.”
Practically everywhere we go from there is up for debate. We can argue over the value of or need for gun control. We can dispute our society’s approach to mental health care. We can discuss the limits of free speech and dangers of incivility online. All of those are important and relevant topics.
But we get nowhere on any of them if we associate the emotion-fueled misbehaviors of a perverse actor from “the other side” with the legitimate and diverse intellectual arguments that make up any productive debate. In the aftermath of each new outrage, it is natural to cast about for overarching, all-encompassing solutions. They likely do not exist. But to the extent that we can strive for some ideal solution, we begin best by refusing to attribute to the group of our adversaries the irrational behaviors that a random aberrant acts out in their name.
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