I don’t know what happened,” Mable Benjamin, a lifelong Chatham resident and daily lottery player, said. “I thought it was for schools, but the way it sounds, it’s not anymore. Although most knew the lottery has traditionally helped fund public education, they were not sure whether this is still the case. On a Saturday morning at Hollywood Food Market on the border of Chatham and Greater Grand Crossing, several lottery players only had a vague idea of how Illinois uses funds from the lottery. “Many people believed…that the net revenue from the lottery, after paying winners and the administrative costs, was going to be an additional investment in the K-12 education system. For every dollar from the lottery that goes into the Common School Fund, a dollar from another state revenue source comes out, explained Ralph Martire, Executive Director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability. However, the lottery does not actually increase the amount of money that goes to schools: lottery funds replace existing funds rather than supplementing them. In its history, the lottery has provided over $19 billion to public education and millions to other causes, the Lottery said in an email. The lottery annually contributes around $670 million towards K-12 education, or about ten percent of the state’s total K-12 spending. Since 1985, Illinois has directed its lottery proceeds into the Common School Fund, which distributes money to school districts across the state. “Given that you have some communities on the South and West Sides that generate $20 million a year, compared to a couple million dollars a year in Lincoln Park, there’s no mystery in terms of who that money is coming from,” Henricks said in an interview. About seventy percent of Illinois’s lottery funds come from the Chicago Metropolitan Area, and spending within Chicago is concentrated in communities of color on the South and West Sides, according to new research by Kasey Henricks, a sociologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The use of Illinois lottery funds is especially important to McBryde and other South Side residents, who contribute a significant portion of the lottery’s total revenue. Earlier this month, a bipartisan commission created by Governor Bruce Rauner published a report highlighting the wide funding gaps between high- and low-income school districts in Illinois. Illinois also has one of the least equitable school funding formulas in the country. Illinois has not had a budget for nineteen months, instead relying on stopgap spending to fund social services such as public education. “But the pots of the lottery are getting huge, so where is the money going?” “We’ve lost too many schools and then we see fighting for more money from Springfield,” said Scotty McBryde, an eighteen-year Chatham resident and daily lottery player. Every year, the Illinois State Lottery contributes hundreds of millions of dollars to help fund public education in Illinois, but areas with high lottery sales often also have school districts that remain severely underfunded.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |