The Freeport School District 145 board recently voted to eliminate dozens of staff positions because of a projected $11 million budget deficit.
They mostly cut support staff along with some certified teachers and a few administrators.
"We’re definitely going to see students who struggle with reading and math be impacted at the elementary level," said Kelly Everding, president of the Freeport Education Association and a history teacher at the high school. "We’re going to see students who utilize the library and library lessons impacted. We’re going to see students who need social emotional support impacted.”
Everding says this is the first time in over 30 years Freeport’s dealt with staffing cuts this severe, but it’s not just them.
Rockford Public Schools just axed over 100 positions because of a $15 million deficit. Harlem is closing down two schools. Belvidere's facing a multi-million-dollar deficit. Even higher-income districts like Naperville aren’t safe. Its board just voted down proposed staffing cuts meant to reduce their $12 million deficit.
Emily Warnecke says it’s a perfect storm. Expenses are increasing while support slips away. She works in government relations with the Illinois Association of School Administrators and Illinois Association of School Business Officials.
For her, one of the biggest reasons for this storm is a sharp increase in the cost of “mandated categorical” spending. As the name implies, these are mandated school services like busing, transportation of special education students, and educating special-ed students who learn at dedicated facilities.
Warnecke says schools spend money on these services, file a claim with the state, and get a certain amount reimbursed.
“What we've seen with that over the last couple of years, mainly since COVID, is that those claims are going up annually by a rate of 13%," she said. "Prior to COVID, we were seeing about a 2% increase.”
Take Rockford Public Schools for example. In 2022, the state reimbursed pretty much all of their special education transportation costs. A lot of their regular transportation was reimbursed too, and the local district was left to foot the bill for the remaining $800,000.
Fast forward to 2026, costs have gone up and reimbursements have stayed the same. So, now the bill is up to $7.5 million.
Warnecke says it’s not something districts anticipated. She says the reason those costs jumped in the first place is because school busing companies are dealing with inflation, competition to hire drivers, and of course, the increasing cost of fuel.
Another factor here is the cost of health care. Jason Blume is an administrator at the Harlem School District.
“We've seen an increase of almost 38% in four years. Like we're pushing $20 million in health care costs," he said. "That's a big, big cost.”
Rockford Public Schools superintendent Ehren Jarrett is dealing with the same thing.
“When you have a 6% increase one year and then a 6% increase the next year, it builds," he said. "Unfortunately, that's how you go from a budget surplus to a budget deficit pretty quickly. And, unfortunately, the only way to get ahead of this was to cut back on some staff.”
During the pandemic era, schools often added support staff for mental health and academic intervention. During that period, they also had access to federal relief funding called “ESSER.” It expired in the fall of 2024, so if schools used it for those roles, they now have to find another way to pay for it, which becomes more difficult when health care and transportation costs surge at the same time.
Add on top of that uncertainty around federal funding for education and you’ve got a perfect storm and multi-million-dollar budget deficits everywhere from diverse, low-income districts to affluent suburban schools. Smaller schools are dealing with this too. It’s just harder to find accessible information about their budgets.
But in some districts, like Freeport, people feel like this isn’t simply a story of choppy waters schools are all trying to sail through. Kelly Everding with the Freeport Education Association says their board’s “poor financial stewardship” is also to blame for their deficit.
“Things like the loss of ESSER funds, we knew that was going to happen. We should have been able to predict that," she said. "We had some building maintenance issues that were deferred for many years, and those all came to a head here at this point in time. Had we worked on those earlier, that might have lessened the cost as well.”
The deficit challenges aren’t all equal either. Even though Rockford’s total deficit is larger, Freeport’s represents a much bigger percentage of their budget.
Emily Warnecke says it’s hard to predict how long some challenges, like inflation, will stick around. But she says a few of these issues can be solved or at least soothed. It’s why her groups are advocating for the state to increase reimbursement rates for those “mandated categorical” costs like special ed transportation.
If not, she says, the financial reality for schools will be even more dire and even more may have to consider cuts.
