* I told subscribers about this earlier in the week. Press release…

27,000 students in Illinois are set to lose access to afterschool programming in Illinois. Due to internal errors, the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) will not have enough money to adequately fund 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC) programs past this fiscal year. 21st CCLC programs are funded by the U.S. Department of Education and then administered by ISBE. ISBE has overspent its 21st CCLC funds beyond the funding that the federal government provides. This means ISBE is not able to cover all of its current contracts.

80% of these students are people of color, including 30% being Black youth and 36% being Latinx youth. These students all attend high poverty, low-performing schools and 66% of participants overall are qualified for free and reduced lunch. Cutting funding to afterschool programs due to an administrative error is unacceptable. A large body of research shows that 21st CCLC programs can support students in the areas where they need it most post pandemic, including improving academics, keeping youth safe, and providing social and emotion supports. These programs are also crucial resources for working families.

Afterschool programs are now asking ISBE and the General Assembly to allocate state funds to cover this error. Programs also need ISBE to investigate how this error happened and how to prevent it from happening again.

* WBEZ…

A miscalculation by the state of Illinois is putting in jeopardy after-school programs that serve about 27,000 students across the state.

That’s according to ACT Now, a statewide advocacy organization for Illinois after-school programs.

Staff from many of these threatened programs, spanning from Chicago to East Moline to Vermillion County, will be in Springfield Wednesday to testify at the monthly Illinois State Board of Education meeting.

They plan to ask lawmakers and the state board to allocate state funds to cover the state’s error as it administered federal 21st Century Community Learning Center grants, which are provided to community organizations. They also want them to investigate how the error occurred to prevent it from happening again.

During the pandemic, the state awarded a new set of programs 21st Century grants and allowed organizations to keep unspent money, not realizing this would result in insufficient funding to continue funding longtime recipients. ISBE estimates this could result in a shortfall of up to $15 million.

* Part of ISBE’s response…

ISBE has reached out to the U.S. Department of Education about utilizing ARP ESSER state set aside funds to address the shortfall. This would allow ISBE to meet its obligations to grantees in FY 2024, but would still not make a renewal or new grant competition possible for FY 2024 for those grantees whose five-year grant cycle concludes in FY 2023. Renewals and new competitions are never guaranteed and are only offered in years when sufficient funds are available. (ISBE did not offer new 21st CCLC Grant competitions in about half of the last 10 years.)

* Sun-Times editorial…

Chicago Public Schools plans to use federal COVID-19 relief money to help out programs here that are in jeopardy.

Meanwhile, kids shouldn’t pay the price, and state lawmakers can fill the budget gap for programs elsewhere that need help. ISBE, for its part, has to make sure costly miscalculations don’t happen again.

Down the road, though, community-run after-school programs that operate on shoestring budgets need some assurance of long-term funding. That’s the problem these programs, as well as state government and private philanthropy, will need to answer. […]

The need is clearly there. Fewer than one in five Illinois teens — 18% — participate in an after-school program, yet 41% would do so if programs were available, according to the group ACT (After School for Children and Teens) Now Illinois.