Illinois’ school funding formula changed in 2017. Is your local district getting its share?

In fiscal year 2017, Belleville District 118 received about $18 million in state funding and Belleville District 201 received about $13.3 million.

Fast forward to this year, the amount of state dollars each district is receiving has significantly increased: District 118 is receiving $26 million in fiscal year 2025 and District 201's funding has more than doubled to $30.4 million.

State funding for the two big Belleville school districts and many others in the metro-east have been increasing since Illinois revamped how it funds education. In 2017, then-Gov. Bruce Rauner signed into law a new school funding formula to reverse decades of inequitable support provided to public schools.

The new formula — referred to as evidence-based funding or EBF — set out the goal of fully funding public schools by 2027 with a total increase of more than $8 billion in state education funding.

"The model has probably been the single most significant financial event of my 27-year career for schools," District 201 Superintendent Brian Mentzer said.

In the early 2010s, the district was consistently operating at a deficit and relying on long-term borrowing to stay afloat, he said, a situation exacerbated by the decline in local property values during the Great Recession and an accompanied decline in state funding.

"It was extremely difficult," Mentzer said.

There was little money for instructional innovation, pay increases and professional development for staff, and other resources, Mentzer said.

"That was just the way we had to operate at the time," he said.

With evidence-based funding, District 201 has been able to do a lot more, he added.

For example, thanks to the additional state funding as well as pandemic-era relief funds from the federal government, the district has a new campus with the Center for Academic or Vocational Excellence , or CAVE, made a plethora of facility improvements at both the Belleville West and East campuses, and provided teachers with the things they needed as they reimagined what their instruction and classrooms could look like with more funding, Assistant Superintendent Dustin Bilbruck said.

Select school district:

Alton 11Belle Valley 119Belleville 118Belleville 201Bethalto 8Brooklyn 188Cahokia 187Central 104Collinsville 10Dupo 196East Alton 13East Alton-Wood River 14East St. Louis 189Edwardsville 7Freeburg 70Freeburg 77Granite City 9Grant 110Harmony-Emge 175Highland 5High Mount 116Lebanon 9Madison 12Marissa 40Mascoutah 19Millstadt 160New Athens 60O'Fallon 90O'Fallon 203Pontiac-William Holliday 105Roxana 1Shiloh Village 85Signal Hill 181Smithton 130St. Libory 30Triad 2Venice 3Whiteside 115Wolf Branch 113Wood River-Hartford 15

The district also has been able to drive down its class sizes by hiring more staff and expand its extracurricular offerings . According to the Illinois Report Card, District 201's teacher-to-student ratio has decreased from 21.7-to-1 in the 2014-15 school year to 19.5-to-1 in 2023-24.

The increased state support also "relieves the stress placed on other pieces of the puzzle," like the local tax levy, Mentzer said.

In the 2010s, the district tried to maintain its tax rate but got to a point where it had to raise the rate to avoid significant program cuts.

St. Clair County records show that District 201's tax rate steadily rose from 1.9700 in 2010 to a high of 2.1554 in 2016 before decreasing. In 2023, it reached 1.9633, the lowest in more than a decade.

District 118 Superintendent Ryan Boike echoed the sentiment that evidence-based funding helps the district maintain its tax rate.

"When we are seeing additional state dollars, we don't necessarily have to go to our taxpayers in our district for additional money," he said.

Boike said now that pandemic-era relief funding from the federal government is in the rear-view mirror, District 118 is able to maintain some of the things it did with those dollars, like hiring staff to lower class sizes as well as instructional coaches to support teachers, with the increased state funding.

According to the Illinois Report Card , District 118's teacher-to-student ratio has decreased from 20.1-to-1 in the 2014-15 school year to 16.9-to-1 in 2023-24.

He emphasized the importance of evidence-based funding for hiring staff, since about 70% of most school districts' budgets goes to personnel for salaries and benefits.

"Being able to maintain the needed staff and programs that we added, and being able to keep going forward with those, I think EBF has a huge impact on that," Boike said.

"The other thing is, everything costs a little bit more every additional year. When you don't see additional money, it's hard to keep up," he said.

"Nobody sends their kids to school for the second-best opportunity," Boike added. "We want this year's kids to have the best opportunity, so that we keep building that momentum."

Is your school district 'adequately' funded yet?

In August 2017, after years of political compromise in the state legislature, former Gov. Bruce Rauner signed into law the Evidence-Based Funding for Student Success Act , which set the goal of fully funding public schools by 2027.

The legislation does so by sending more state dollars each year to the school districts that are furthest from being adequately funded, according to the formula.

The law also set forth $350 million as the minimum annual increase in funding, which doesn't comply with the 2027 deadline. The state has met that minimum each fiscal year since 2018, with the exception of 2021, when state education funding remained flat amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

If the legislature continues to appropriate $350 million annually, Illinois schools will not be fully funded until between fiscal years 2034 and 2038, according to Funding Illinois' Future, a coalition of school districts, educators and various organizations that was a key player in getting the evidence-based funding formula passed.

Many advocates, including Funding Illinois' Future, are urging the legislature to fund the formula with an increase of at least $550 million each year , which means schools would be fully funded between fiscal year 2030 and 2031.

Districts 201 and 118 are both in "tier one" of the evidence-based funding formula, meaning they are among those that are the furthest from being adequately funded.

To be considered "adequately funded," District 201 would need about $72.4 million in revenue for fiscal year 2025, according to state data.

The district's local and state revenue total about $49.3 million, meaning the district is 68.1% adequately funded, up from 55.3% adequacy in fiscal year 2018.

District 201 is among the 49 Illinois school districts that remain below 70% adequacy. In fiscal year 2018, the first year the evidence-based funding formula was used, there were 430 school districts below 70% adequacy, according to the Illinois State Board of Education.

District 118 would need about $46.5 million in revenue for fiscal year 2025 to be adequately funded according to the formula. Its local and state revenue total about $35.6 million, meaning the district is at 76.6% adequacy, compared to 57% adequacy in 2018.

While District 201 is still below its adequacy target, Mentzer said adequacy is a moving, research-based target and he finds it more helpful to look at where a district started with the evidence-based funding formula and what it has been able to do since then.

"Before EBF arrived, we found a way to live within our means," he said.

He compared a school district to a household: you find a way to live within your income, and when your income goes up, you either spend it, save it or do some combination of the two.

It was partly through saved-up reserves that District 201 was able to purchase the Kings Point property and remodel it to become the CAVE, which is now growing both in size and programs .

"We've seen evidence based funding do what it was supposed to," Boike of District 118 said. "And that is work towards that goal of our district being adequately funded."

How does EBF work?

The evidence-based funding formula is detailed and complex, but it generally consists of three steps :

The district's final percent of adequacy determines which "tier" it is assigned. Districts that are below 77.3% are in tier one, while districts that are at or over 100% are in tier four, with tiers two and three falling in between.

Much like other state funding formulas, the evidence-based funding formula doesn't take into account any revenue a district may receive from the federal government. That's because most federal grants are meant to supplement state and local revenue, not replace it.

While the law outlining evidence-based funding defines full funding as meeting 100% of each district's adequacy target, the Illinois State Board of Education defines it at 90% since school districts receive an average of 10% of their annual budget from federal funds.