North Cook News

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker insists that he is still holding out hope that his Invest in Kids school choice scholarship program may still be resurrected on June 1.

The Invest in Kids program steers tax credits to individuals who use the private funding to provide for the additional tuition costs of students attending private schools in Illinois and is slated to expire at the end of the year unless lawmakers in Springfield move to take action on current policy.

“I think we should have tax credits that support education and other things in state government, but we also have the federal government willing to cover about 40% of the cost,” Pritzker said at an unrelated event in Champaign Wednesday. “Why have we created a program in which we’re paying for 75% of it and not having the rest of the country essentially paying 40%?”

In a recent Illinois Policy Institute survey carried out by Echelon Insights, nearly two out of every three voters across the state agreed they support school choice, as opposed to a mere 28% of respondents who marked on the survey that they are opposed to the program.

Over the current 2023 school year, more than 9,000 students across the state received additional help from the Invest in Kids tax credit scholarship, which among other rules stipulates that the families of the children awarded the scholarships may not earn more than 400% of the income threshold for the federal poverty level.

As part of the new $50.6 billion spending plan, Pritzker worked hand-and-hand with the Democratic majority in Springfield. Pritzker set aside a $350 million increase to the K-12 education funding formula, a $100 million infusion to college and university funding and a $100 million investment in the Monetary Award Program grant funding for college scholarships.