As news of Governor Bruce Rauner’s amendatory vetoes spread this week, education organizations shared their reactions with The Daily Line.

Michael Chamness, of the Illinois Association of School Administrators: “We would hope that sooner rather than later, either the amendatory veto is overridden, upheld, or there’s a compromise. Because without any of those three things happening we have no mechanism to move funding to schools, and this needs to be resolved as soon as possible. We can support legislation that replaces the outdated broken current formula with the Evidence-Based model and holds all school districts in Illinois harmless. In other words, no red numbers.”


Roger Eddy, of the Illinois Association of School Boards: “When you’re messing with the formula, when you pull one lever another lever gets affected. So we’re still analyzing the effect of all the proposals and the changes that (Rauner) made. Whenever you change any one component of this–whether it relates to the minimum funding level, whether it’s the removal of the block grant, or the the pension considerations--it affects base funding minimums and even the tier status of the school. So you almost have a do a calculation to make sure everyone is in the black. That’s important to us because one of our foundational principles was that there would be no red numbers.”

Jim Reed, of the Illinois Education Association: “SB1 looks very different as sent to the governor versus how it was drafted. So if you take the language the governor has changed in it, it really looks like a different bill. From that perspective, we have really got to look at it as two separate entities, and whether or not it’s substantially the same as it was when going through the General Assembly. At that time, we thought the very important part of the bill was the idea of addressing school funding to be sure we addressed low-income districts and poor performing districts, and bring them up.”