Sandack: Time for action on school funding bills

House Republican Leader Jim Durkin has filed two emergency spending bills that will allow all schools to open on time and also ensure that critical budget areas like universities and colleges, the correctional system and other vital service areas of government are funded through the end of the year.

These bills, HB 6583 and HB 6585, are balanced. Neither would add a cent of debt to the state of Illinois.

The stopgap, HB 6583, would allow every Illinois school district to be fully funded at 100 percent of the foundation level for the first time since 2012. Additionally, the bill holds harmless those school districts including Chicago Public Schools that would lose state funding in 2017 due to rising property values along with a decline in poverty. But most importantly, it removes K-12 schoolchildren from the crossfire of the larger budget impasse.

Read the rest of Represenative Ron Sandack's letter to the editor in the Daily Herald.