Metro East Sun

Sen. Andy Manar (D-Bunker Hill) wants to know why “false and erroneous drafts” of information regarding a school funding measure got leaked to the press, including being published in the Kankakee Times.

The Times is published by Local Government Information Services, which also owns this publication.

The Senate passed SB1 on May 17; it is now in the House. Following the Senate vote, the Times reported how SB1 would impact the county's districts using an analysis by the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) of Manar's previously proposed formula changes. The information has been available on ISBE's website for nearly a year.

According to that latest publicly available version of the formula 34 Metro East schools would lose out on state funding under the plan.

In a press conference two days after passage, Manar claimed the governor's administration leaked documents, calling it “a serious violation of trust.”

“We think that everyone deserves an answer into how and why (the leak) happened,” Manar said, referencing documents that legislators saw the day before, he said.

Manar called on Rauner to make a public effort to show why the information ended up in the news media.

He also argued that a "good faith" negotiation process goes to waste when one side can't be trusted to follow through.

"We're asking, 'What's the governor doing about it?'" Manar said. "If the governor is interested in reforming a system that he claims he is interested in reforming, then he would get to the bottom of this, some heads would roll, and then we would have an adult conversation about facts, and then we could negotiate, and that's how you get to a bipartisan agreement."

The Rauner administration has countered that the figures presented in the published article had been accessible online for months.

“The  Senate Democrats today jumped the shark,” Eleni Demertzis, a  spokesperson for Rauner, said in a statement. “One cannot leak something  that is on a public website. Their false and outrageous accusations  have been disproven, and they should apologize for manufacturing  blatantly false accusations.”

Manar said the Kankakee County figures were incorrect because the bill was changed, making the previous ISBE analysis outdated. However, he said a new ISBE analysis was not completed before the Senate voted on the bill, so he couldn't refute the previous analysis with new data.

Senators who voted for the revised bill did so without seeing an analysis of the plan or knowing how it would affect funding for school districts, Manar admitted during the press conference. But that's not unusual, he said.

"We’ve requested them. It takes time," Manar said. "I don’t think there is anything going on here other than what the normal process is."

Democratic officials say they filed a complaint with the Illinois executive inspector general to determine how the information was given to press outlets.

“We consider public education as the state's No. 1 priority in conjunction with a balanced budget,” Manar said.

Manar described working with state officials to try to find solutions for educational budgeting. He said Gov. Bruce Rauner has knowledge of serious issues in the state's budget system.

“One thing that is important is to maintain some level of trust,” Manar said.

Several other legislators also spoke on the issue at the press conference. None of them presented evidence to support claims that the Times figures were false, that they were obtained from the governor's office or that Rauner is connected to the publication.

“I represent a district that is struggling,” Sen. Toi Hutchinson (D-Chicago Heights), said. “I'll match anybody on the merits — but don't lie."

Hutchinson cited a level of “noise, angst and cynicism” that makes it hard to conduct efficient work on state legislation.

“Children in Kankakee County deserve nothing less than the best that we can give them,” Hutchinson said.