Which schools in Illinois are in the most trouble?

Illinois has a budget crisis. There are currently about 60 hours left in the fiscal year and the state still hasn’t passed a budget. One of the biggest pressure points is K-12 funding. If the general assembly doesn’t pass K-12 funding soon then many schools across the state will be unable to open. As a way to show constituents that members of the General Assembly posted a spreadsheet that indicated how many days every school district in the state could operate if they didn’t receive funding in the upcoming fiscal year. It was assembled by the Illinois School Management Alliance. I make no claim about the methdology of determination, I just want to analyze the data they passed on.

Some initial analysis

Let’s take a broad look at the data.

dim(schools)
## [1] 853   6

There are 853 districts in the state.

summary(schools$days)
##    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max.    NA's 
##     6.0   158.5   209.0   196.6   246.0   279.0     542

Here are some simple frequencies. There is one big thing to note here: there are 542 NA’s. Those NA’s are actually districts that can remain open for the entire year. That means about 63% of districts can survive the entire year without state funding. Let’s visualize what that looks like.

That far right bar represents all the schools that survive for at least 365 days. Schools are doing pretty well, overall. They are stockpiling a large amount of reserves.

Let’s just look at schools that would run out early. Remember that this is just 35% of the school districts.

Just to point a finer point on this. 25 schools would make it less than 100 days. That’s about 3%. 113 schools wouldn’t make it past 180 days. That’s 13%.

Mapping

I need to do a lot of things with this data to generate a map of the counties that are most in danger. The first thing I’m going to do is eliminate all those districts that could survive the entire year and just deal with 311 that remain.

In order for a map to make any sense it can’t just be a raw count of number of schools in trouble by county, but it needs to expressed as a percentage of schools that have a limited amount of funds. So what you will see going forward is the percentage of schools that wouldn’t make it the entire year in each individual county. Some counties are gray because they don’t have any schools that met the threshold. In addition, I didn’t worry about CPS. They have their own unique set of problems and their school district is an animal all its own.

The results here are pretty dramatic. While most counties have at least one district in trouble, there aren’t that many struggling schools in northern and central Illinois. But once you get south of I-70, things start to change. There are a lot of dark reds there, and when you move to southeastern Illinois things get pretty bleak. Pope, Gallatin, Hardin counties are all struggling.

I wanted to compare the number of schools in trouble with the poverty rate by county. It’s somewhat interesting to note that a lot of counties in Illinois have about the same level of poverty. Many are in the 10-15% range. There is some more poverty in southern Illinois but the difference isn’t really that stark. I also mapped children’s poverty rate, and the unemployment rate. Southern Illinois is really no different in this regard.

Breakdown by Members of the General Assembly

It might be helpful for our state representatives to know which of them represent the highest number of schools that are in danger of closing down. Let’s do a count and display that in a histogram.

DataTable

Below is datatable that is interactive and will allow you to search for any school district and look at the amount of time they have before the money runs out.

Discussion

When these numbers were released they made statewide news. One headline reads, “Budget deadlock could delay the start of schools in Illinois”. That’s honestly not what the data says. Three schools had less than a month of cash on hand. Many more could have made it through the November election without a state budget. So what’s happening here? An obvious answer is this: schools have realized that they can’t count on the state for approprations and have begun amass a huge reserve fund. I’m not an expert in education budgeting, but having a year of cash on hand is a pretty significant nest egg. That means that they aren’t hiring teachers when they could. They aren’t expanding programs when it may be necessary. All because they don’t trust the state.

The other question is: why are some schools so low on reserve funds? I’ve shown that it isn’t really related to external economic factors. Maybe it’s poorly run districts? It’s hard to say.

The bottom line is simple: K-12 could survive a starvation diet for a while. They have the reserves. Social services and higher ed are now on life support. The GA is choosing to do the politically expedient thing.

Further questions about this analysis can be directed to: ryanburge@gmail.com