In the ongoing budget grudge match between Governor Bruce Rauner and the Democratically-controlled legislature, one bright spot is that public schools have been spared.
Rauner, in fact, has boasted that under his administration, general state aid for schools has been fully funded for the first time in years. But there's a caveat to that claim.
General State Aid is the amount allocated to school districts to bridge the gap between what they can raise via property taxes and the cost of a basic education. Lawmakers have gotten into the habit of “pro-rating” state aid, effectively lopping off a portion of each district’s bridge. Rauner signed a budget that ended the practice for GSA, but kept pro-rating line items like transportation and special education. These are known as mandated categoricals, or MCats for short.
Now, thanks to the budget impasse, even those reduced funds are being delayed.
Chuck Lane, superintendent of Centralia High School, says he’s waiting for money that was supposed to come in the summer.
“I got about $100,000 more in state aid this year, but they took that same amount of money and I haven’t gotten that yet from last year on the MCats. So what have we really gained?” (0:07)
Lane says he doesn’t mean to sound ungrateful, because he realizes higher education has suffered even more drastic cuts.
