Illinois Democrats End State’s Only School Choice Program

The Democrat-controlled state legislature in Illinois has allowed the state’s only school choice program to expire, ending scholarship opportunities for nearly 10,000 low-income students across the state.

The Invest in Kids tax credit scholarship program will expire at the end of the current school year after Illinois Democrats ended the fall legislative session on Thursday without bringing the program to the floor to be renewed.

According to The Daily Wire, “The $75 million program awards an income tax credit to taxpayers who donate to scholarship funds that allow lower-income students to attend private schools.”

Around 9,700 students across Illinois received scholarships through this program in the last school year. The state’s largest scholarship-granting organization, Empower Illinois, reported that the average family income for students receiving these scholarships was $45,000.

For the last five years, Republicans and some Chicago-area Democrats have been pushing to renew a slimmed-down version of the program — cutting it down to $50 million, slashing the tax credit amount, reducing the donation cap from $1 million to $500,000 and focusing the program more on low-income students. While the slimmed-down version was not as beneficial for all students, it was better than no program at all, according to parents.

However, the majority of Democrat state lawmakers refused to even back the slimmed-down proposal — with Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch (D) refusing to even call the bill to the floor for a vote.

A group of Democrats in the state House condemned the program on Monday — falsely claiming that school vouchers “perpetuate and deepen the education inequities that plague Illinois.” They also complained that many private schools are “run by religious groups” and supposedly “openly discriminate” based on things like gender identity.

Despite these attacks on the program, hundreds of parents and other supporters of school choice gathered to protest in support of the program at the House during all six days of the fall legislative session, carrying signs reading “Save My Scholarship.”

State Rep. Adam Niemerg (R) spoke out in favor of the bill on the floor, demanding that the speaker call it for a vote and “save the scholarships.”

House Minority Leader Tony McCombie (R) has vowed to fight to reauthorize the program next year, stating: “I think there is some things that we can do to make it a better program, a more effective program, that could serve more students as well.”

The biggest opponents of the Invest in Kids programs were teachers unions, who stand to lose the most money as failing public schools lose funding when parents are given the choice to send their children to better schools.

Dan Montgomery, the president of the Illinois Federation of Teachers, celebrated the end of the scholarships in a statement released on Thursday, arguing that there is a “nationwide push to divert public dollars from our public schools.”

“Illinois lawmakers chose to put our public schools first and end the state program that subsidized private, mostly religious schools, many of which have discriminatory policies,” the union president claimed in the statement.