Illinois school budget blunders and corruption raise questions about taxpayer oversight

So two school districts in the Chicago area making headlines over apparent money mismanagement issues. First off, we've got a former Aurora School Board president charged with fraud. And then we've got the Evanston-Skokie district miscalculating its financial estimates as well. So joining us to talk about all of this this morning from the Illinois Policy Institute is Bryce Hill. Bryce, good to have you this morning. Thank you for having me. All right, so let's start with the Evanston-Skokie district situation first. So District 65 has revised its financial projections, upping the estimated $17 million error disclosed last week to over 27 million. I mean, we're talking about, that's a major miscalculation. So how could a school district make that kind of mistake? Yeah, I think this is a perfect example of not having lots of checks and balances and really a long timeline between when budgets are introduced versus when they're passed and having a lack of community involvement. It was actually members of the community that caught this error. So that's part of the reason why it's so important that when we discuss, whether it be the city of Chicago's budget or your local school district budgets, that we have plenty of time for public Public comment and scrutiny because, you know, I'm. This may not have been an intentional error, but when people don't have the opportunity to give input or have outside eyes on a project of this scope, internal errors can happen. And this is part of the reason why we allow for public comment during these periods. Actually, that's really interesting that you bring this up because that was our question is like what kind of oversight exists? When it comes to these school districts and these budgets, because we're talking about millions of dollars in taxpayer money here. So what kind of oversight is out there? Yeah, historically, really, there hasn't been a ton of oversight. That has been changing in recent years. There's actually legislation that's taking effect in 2027 and later in 2028 regarding the reporting that local governments, including school districts, have to submit to the comptroller who later then oversees all of this. But that could still be strengthened. So they have some reporting requirements now and they have additional ones coming up. But in order to catch things like this, we really need a standardized system that has Standard reporting requirements across all units of local government that would make it much, much easier for an office like the comptroller's office to be able to flag errors like this. Because when things are reported in varying formats across the thousands upon thousands of units of local government in Illinois, we have more than any other state. It becomes very difficult for the comptroller's office, for a watchdog group, for individuals who are supposed to be providing for themselves and just worried about their day to day and not having to worry about this sort of error. It becomes very difficult for those types of organizations and individuals to monitor the situation. So I wanna, we don't have too much time left unfortunately, I have so many questions about this. But I wanna ask you about this school board president, this former Aurora school board president, Annette Johnson, facing federal charges as well for allegedly orchestrating a bribery scheme, accepting over a million bucks. What are your thoughts on this investigation right now? I think it's part of a larger culture of corruption in state and local government, public officials across Illinois. So studies from the University of Chicago consistently find that Illinois is one of the top three states when it comes to public official corruption convictions. They find that the Chicago area in particular is the worst in the nation when And when it comes to that metric. And just earlier this year, we saw State Rep Carol Ammons be indicted with 10 counts, 10 felony counts for alleged misappropriation of campaign funds and state grants. We've seen the saga in Dolan with former Mayor Tiffany Hinyard and the misappropriation, alleged misappropriation of funds there. So this is all part of a broader culture of corruption within Illinois. And it gets back to that lack of oversight. When you have so many units of local government, when you have them collecting the highest property taxes in the nation, you have Billions upon billions of dollars flowing in and then being dispersed upon thousands of different units of local government, it becomes extremely difficult to track. And unfortunately, that corruption is really deep rooted in the state of Illinois. So Bryce, let me ask you this, I mean, and this goes back to the Evanston Skokie thing where you said community members were finding these errors. If I have a kid in a school district, I gotta be, I'm not an accounting person, like I can I'm barely getting my own budget together. So while this legislation is moving through and things might change in the future, what can I do right now as a parent, let's say, with kids in a school district to make sure that the budget is correct? What am I supposed to do right now? I think the first thing you can do is to contact your local school board, attend those school board meetings, ask questions when they have open hearings regarding the budget because all those things happen. Unfortunately, we have busy day to day lives. So attending those meetings becomes very difficult. And so it's part of the reason why we're advocating for a stricter process, better reporting requirements that make it easier for parents and individuals to see where their tax dollars are going. But that's really the starting place right now and there's no substitute for just hands on involvement. And it's also part of the reason why organizations like ours exist to try to do some of that hard work for you so that people can go about their day to day lives. Yeah, Bryce, appreciate you being here and answering some of these questions for us. Definitely something we will be watching. Thank you.