How many Illinois School Districts believe in School Choice for employees, but not for YOUR kids?

By: Diane Benjamin School Districts request waivers of tuition so out-of-districts students don’t have to pay tuition to attend. The requests are usually for multiple years and for children of District employees, some like Tri-Valley requested a waiver for only children of licensed staff. This is a follow-up to this story, I wanted to see […]

Tri-Valley: Mouser gets SCHOOL CHOICE, you don’t

By: Diane Benjamin I received a tip that before David Mouser left Tri-Valley for his new job as Superintendent of District 87 he got approval allowing the children of employees to attend Tri-Valley even if they don’t live in the District. His wife works at Tri-Valley, the family moved probably because District 87 thought their […]

Unit 5: Where is the $21,549,685?

By: Diane Benjamin The Unit 5 School Board is meeting tonight at Normal West – 6:30. Comprehensive Sexual Education is on the Agenda: https://meetings.boardbook.org/Public/Agenda/1482?meeting=531212 I watched most of the Phase II Community Engagement virtual meeting last night. Way too much of the presentation consisted of what Unit 5 could do if they had more money […]

Schools Boards let their power disappear

By: Diane Benjamin School Boards exists because they are elected by THE PEOPLE to watch and control what happens in government run schools. In Illinois many elected school board members are told “Let the professionals handle running the schools”. Sound familiar, as in “professional staff”? New Board members are indoctrinated with a trip to Chicago […]

Unit 5 and EQUITY

By: Diane Benjamin If you haven’t browsed Unit 5’s website, you missed this link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cPB0fnxfB3G2Dwp8Cyzawy5_bPej-A-C/view That is an update to their Equity Action Plan. See PDF pages 5 and 6 for what they want to achieve. This paragraph bothers me: The purpose of public schools is to teach. Students should never know the “authentic self” […]

Social and Emotional Learning

By: Diane Benjamin Illinois Public Schools are required by law to use Social and Emotional Learning. You can see the current plan on the Illinois State Board of Education website: https://www.isbe.net/Pages/Social-Emotional-Learning-Standards.aspx Social and Emotional Learning can easily be summed up with this quote for the document I linked in the Critical race Theory story is […]

The Illinois Progressive War on Children

By: Diane Benjamin Capitalism has proven to the world that competition produces better results than monopolies.  Costs decrease, quality increases, and better products are delivered to consumers. Illinois started a program in 2017 called Invest in Kids which provides a tax credit for parents wanting their kids in private schools but can’t afford it:   http://www.revenue.state.il.us/InvestInKids/ […]