The state’s ongoing budget impasse has hit community colleges particularly hard, with funds to these schools and the students who attend them drastically reduced.
The Illinois Community College Board is distributing $3 million dollars in emergency aid, divided among seven campuses.
Community colleges have three main sources of funding: Local property taxes, state government, and student tuition; that means some campuses rely on the state for up to 45 percent of their budgets.
That reliance was a major factor in how the board doled out that $3 million equally among schools in Olney, Centralia, Mattoon, Carterville, Ina, Ullin, and Harrisburg, according to Matt Berry, spokesman for the board.
So is there anything left in the state’s community college piggy bank?
“There’s not. This was the last amount of money that was left to be allocated,” Berry says. “And this only went to seven schools so the rest of the districts won’t be receiving any money until there’s a state appropriation.”
That leaves out more than 40 schools.
