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A new IASA website…and talk of
possible new revenue sources for schools
The votes had barely been
counted when House Speaker
Michael Madigan fired the first shot
in what promises to be one of the
wildest, most contentious election
campaigns in Illinois history. It
looks like schools will be one of
the hot-button issues considering
Madigan’s proposal for a 3 percent
tax on millionaires and Governor
Quinn’s plan to make permanent the income tax hike.
Madigan’s proposal is simple enough on the surface:
Add a 3 percent surcharge to annual income in excess of
$1 million and distribute the money as a block grant to
school districts to the tune of about $550 per student if the
surcharge generates the nearly $1 billion per year that
Madigan estimated.
However, the state constitution must be amended to
change the income tax structure, and approval by a 3/5
majority of the House and Senate is required by May 5 to
place the question on the November ballot. Madigan has
71 Democrats in the House, and he would need every one
of those votes unless he can attract some Republican
support. Senate President John Cullerton has a larger
Democrat majority in the Senate if the measure can pass
the House. Once on the ballot, the measure probably
would have a good chance of passing given recent poll
results and the fact that the surcharge would affect only
some 13,675 millionaires, according to Madigan’s
statistics.
Of course, the devil is always in the details. Madigan’s
plan for distribution is for a simple amount per student as
opposed to the funding going into the complex state school
funding formula, but that is certain to warrant legislative
debate. And there remains skepticism about whether this
funding might go the way of the Lottery money for
education and simply be used to supplant school funding.
Governor Quinn followed Madigan’s act with his
Budget Address, where he said he wants to make
permanent the state income tax increase, provide
homeowners an annual $500 refund and invest $6 billion
in education during the next five years. His five-year
budget plan also includes $100 million a year for Early
Childhood Education and doubling the MAP college
scholarships.
Quinn’s Republican opponent, Bruce Rauner, to no
one’s surprise opposed both ideas to generate revenue,
but Rauner has yet to lay out any specifics of his budget
plan.
I was encouraged to hear Governor Quinn emphasize
the importance of public education to the future of our
state. He absolutely was correct when he said that public
education is the great equalizer.
We have to have more funding for our public schools,
whether it comes from extending the income tax, a
surcharge on millionaires or somewhere else. Many of our
school districts are heavily dependent on state aid and
they are struggling financially to continue to provide top-
notch educational opportunities for children all across the
state.
We need to see more details of Governor Quinn’s
proposal, but it is certainly worth studying as is Speaker
Madigan’s plan to provide a new source of revenue for
schools. Politics aside, we need funding help from
somewhere because, as superintendents painfully know,
school districts all over the state are being suffocated by
deeper and deeper state funding cuts and more and more
unfunded mandates.
IASA unveils new website
As you saw on the cover, we are very pleased to
introduce IASA’s new website. The process has taken
several months to design, build and populate the website,
a joint effort between our staff and a company called
Schoolwires.
I think you will find that the new website has a clean,
progressive look and that it is quite user-friendly. Those
were our main goals when we set out to redesign the site.
On the front page of the new website you will find:
Our association’s most timely news items;
A daily listing of education headlines and stories from
around the state and the nation;
Legislative and professional development updates;
Access to current and back issues of our award-
winning online monthly newsletter
Leadership Matters;
A live Twitter feed; and
A calendar of important upcoming events and links to
our various programs and products
.
Much of our information is for all visitors, but some
items do require member log-in.
We also have changed the former “Superintendent’s
Workplace” into what we think is a more robust, easier-to-
use forum renamed the “Superintendent’s Corner.” This
new forum allows users to customize their own
dashboards with the groups they wish to include and
makes it much easier to include and access attachments
and documents. “Superintendent’s Corner” has many
features and we encourage you to explore them.
In this issue of
Leadership Matters,
we have included
a User’s Guide to the overall website and also to
“Superintendent’s Corner.” We have the ability to continue
to add information to the website and also to tweak parts
of the website, so we certainly welcome your input and
your suggestions.
We encourage you to explore this new website and to
visit often to keep up with what’s going on with IASA and in
the field of public education in Illinois.
Message from the
Executive Director
Dr. Brent Clark
