If you were going to create Illinois from scratch, you certainly wouldn't create what we have today: 800 plus school districts, no relationship to village boundaries, all different sizes, some with 150 students and some with 300,000 students, some with grades K-8, some grades 9-12 and some grades K-1 2; where a teacher in one district makes $25,000 and one in another district, doing the same job, makes $75,000, where one district spends $4,500 per student and another spends $14,500 per student, where you wake up one morning and read in the paper, "school district X is 5 million dollars in debt-, the next day school district Y's superintendent gets a raise to $200,000. How can two such opposite events happen in the same state? It's crazy, confusing and unfair.

What's the inherent problem? Worth School District educates a child for $5,000, of which 10% is  debt service. Yet 70% of Worth students meet or exceed the State Standard on the ISAT. What's  the problem? There is so much more being provided the other students in Illinois, that it's just plain  not fair to the students of Worth. Other students get Reading Recovery, other students get adequate  bilingual services, other students get daily physical education, other students get a foreign  language, other students get access to a decent sized library, other students get access to current Technology, other students eat their lunch in a lunchroom, not their regular classrooms, and have at least one nurse in the district, and not have 10% of my youngest teachers, who left in the past 2 years, go to higher paying districts, etc.  Yet Worth students must compete against the other students in college and the real world.

What's the problem? It's the disparity among school districts.  

I propose a short term solution and a long term solution.

Short Term

We need to arrive at what it cost to educate a child in Illinois by defining what type of program the child should receive. For example, let's take a hypothetical district with 2,700 students. Put that student in a class of 20 students in primary grades and 25 at the junior high. Let that student receive  art and music and physical education and media and the use of technology and ...(These are not frills)  This comes to $7,500 per student. Even the state average operating expense per pupil is almost  $7,000. If a district wants to spend more, through property taxes imposed on residential property, let them. Commercial and industrial property should be collected by means of a common tax rate and redistributed based on economic need. The only way to generate sufficient revenue is to raise the income tax. 

An additional recommendation is to revise the poverty grant rules. We receive zero dollars, because in 1990, 5% of the population in Worth was determined at a poverty level. Yet 25% of our students qualified for free lunches, based on this year's free lunch count. If we were at 19%, we would still receive zero dollars, yet we would still have a couple hundred kids who need extra help.

Long term

Decide what you want Illinois to look like in the long term, 25 years, and move toward that. Perhaps there should be only 25 or 50 or 1 00 school districts. This type of drastic consolidation is the only way, short of a statewide salary schedule for teachers and administrators, to equalize the disparity among what school districts pay their personnel. Since 80% of education costs are for personnel, consolidation reduces the salary disparities among school districts.