Illinois
Schools still rely on cops to ticket kids for minor violations. It's a practice that should stop.
The Illinois legislative session wrapped up late last month without tackling the pervasive issue of school ticketing, a practice where schools refer students to police to be disciplined for school misbehavior.
As a civil rights attorney at the MacArthur Justice Center, I’ve traveled around the state to witness the impact of these tickets. One of the first ticketing hearings I saw was in Joliet, purportedly for “disorderly conduct”: A girl with stomach problems disobeyed a teacher’s instructions to leave the bathroom, resulting in a referral to the police, an obligation to attend a hearing on a school day and a $150 fine.
Her experience is not unique. Across Illinois, tickets of up to hundreds of dollars are issued for things like littering, swearing or hallway scuffles — behaviors that schools should address internally with evidence-based solutions like restorative practices.
The ticketing practice is a debilitating symptom of a larger problem: the transformation of our classrooms into carceral spaces. Over the past decades, schools and prisons have become more alike in law, policy, and staffing. Courts have granted prisons tremendous control over prisoners purportedly in the name of rehabilitation and safety — and they’ve extended that same power to schools.
As incarcerated people lost the right to write each other love letters, students lost the right to discuss teen pregnancy in their news publications. As incarcerated people lost the right to be free of strip searches, students lost the right to demand probable cause before administrators dug through their purses. Supposedly, this is to let schools teach kids values and keep kids safe — but in practice, we know our education system is failing.
Policymakers have mirrored our judiciary in treating schools like carceral institutions, adopting adult surveillance measures and zero-tolerance rules. Scholars say it’s because of the superpredator myth that came about in the 1990s — the racially coded idea that we would see a wave of “elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches.” The rise of school shootings — perpetrated largely by white young men — only motivated school authorities to intensify their policies. And with inadequate resources to address the complex needs of students with disabilities or trauma, schools resort to pushing “problem” kids out to maintain order.
More cops, fewer social workers
There are serious consequences to these fear-driven shortcuts. As schools pour money into staffing law enforcement officers instead of medical providers and social workers, students can find themselves handcuffed in the halls, interrogated without counsel and ferreted toward a cell.
Research on the school-to-prison pipeline proves that police exposure makes young people vulnerable to future lock-ups. In Illinois, one of the most common ways kids get exposed to police is through ticketing. Investigators found that from 2019 to 2022, police were involved in student incidents about 17,800 times in 200 Illinois districts and in more than half of these incidents, they issued tickets.
Rockford Public Schools, a district serving nearly 30,000 students, is an expert at ticketing. During the past school year alone, they issued 590 police referrals as of March 24. Every Wednesday at 1 p.m., when kids should be in school, Rockford City Hall holds its hearings for municipal tickets. Though kids can be as young as 8, these hearings are not privacy-protected. There’s no right to an attorney. And if a kid doesn’t show up, the default fine is $750.
I’ve also never seen a white student ticketed in Rockford. Data shows Black students are more than twice as likely as their white peers to receive a police referral, and Black students with disabilities are more than three times as likely. The disparity is so stark that the National Center for Youth Law and the MacArthur Justice Center have filed a civil rights complaint against Rockford, alleging violations of federal anti-discrimination law.
The same disparities have been playing out across the state. In spring 2022, the Illinois attorney general’s office launched an investigation into the alleged discriminatory ticketing practice in one of Illinois’ largest school districts. There have been no updates.
To be sure, the safety of our children and a shortage of resources are serious concerns. But over-policing students has turned our schools into punitive institutions that devastate our most vulnerable. We need to do better.
For years, advocates have been trying to pass a bill that will end the ticketing practice — and for yet another year, the state has been resistant. It’s long past time for the state to do the necessary work to reform discipline in schools.
Zoe Li is a Liman Public Interest Fellow and civil rights attorney at the MacArthur Justice Center, where she primarily focuses on policing in schools and police misconduct.
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Illinois
Illinois awards AD Josh Whitman a new contract worth more than $31 million over the next 10 years
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Illinois has extended athletic director Josh Whitman’s contract through 2036, committing more than $31 million over the next 10 years on the heels of a series of standout seasons for the department and its teams.
The university’s board of trustees approved the new deal for Whitman at its regular meeting on Thursday. The fifth-longest tenured AD among the four power conferences will make $2.15 million during the 2026-27 school year, a salary increase of more than 40%.
Whitman is scheduled to receive $100,000 raises annually before a $200,000 bump to $3.15 million in the final year of the agreement and a $500,000 retention bonus each June 30 that he remains on the job at Illinois.
The contract also includes additional incentives of up to $500,000 annually related to performance goals set by the university chancellor and three automatic one-year extensions through 2039 if certain Illini football and men’s basketball performance measures are met.
Whitman, a former Illinois football player, was hired in 2016. This was the fifth time his contract has been amended. The men’s basketball team reached the NCAA Final Four in April for the first time in 21 years. The football team won 19 games over the last two seasons, a program record for that span. Illini athletics also set a revenue record for a fourth consecutive year and topped $200 million for the first time in 2025-26, according to the board of trustees meeting memo.
ESSEX, Ill. – It’s been two days since we first told you about Constellation Energy buying several hundred acres of land in or near the Village of Essex and it’s still anyone’s guess what they are going to do with all of that land.
Fox Chicago’s Unit 32 brought you this story and our Bret Buganski is still on the hunt for some answers.
“My thought is, well, I think we lost our butts and our house because we bought it at the premium golf course price and now we are essentially could be having a data center in our backyard,” Essex resident Taylor Gunier said.
Gunier and her family moved into this house last summer.
She has spent the last year working with other concerned residents to figure out what Constellation is going to do with the 700 acres of land they have purchased in and around Essex from June 2025 to February 2026.
Data center in Essex?
The backstory:
Following a Freedom of Information request to the Kankakee County Recorder, a Unit 32 investigation found Constellation spent $47.5 million dollars in fourteen different land deals.
Property records reviewed by Fox Chicago show the company purchased at least 505 acres in just nine months. The total is likely higher because some of the public records did not include the number of acres sold each time.
Unit 32 also found that two Essex Village Board members were sellers in five of those transactions.
“Essex does not have any industrial zoning ordinances, which I think is part of why Constellation chose us. We would have been an easy target with few regulations for them to abide by,” said Essex resident Kylee Raney.
Raney is part of the Essex Coalition, a group of concerned residents following every move between the Essex Village Board and Constellation Energy.
It has also been making some of its own moves.
“We’ve worked with a third party consultant and we have built out a draft of industrial zoning ordinances. They are based off of the Kankakee County industrial zoning ordinances along with some ordinances from Yorkville and the data center that is being built there. So we made sure to keep the language broad so it could cover a multitude of industrial uses, but we wanted to make sure the umbrella of that language included data centers. So we have a petition and we have doubled the numbers of our signatures there. The petition is to urge our village board members to pass industrial zoning ordinances. Even if you don’t know what they’re gonna build, even if Constellation doesn’t have their customer yet, you can put protections, legal protections, legally binding protections in place to ensure that we can mitigate noise pollution, sound pollution, we can monitor water usage. There are lots of avenues that we can take to build out the regulations to protect our future. No matter what happens,” Raney said.
While Raney says Constellation has not told them what they’re going to use the land for, the village board seems to be taking precautions for a data center.
On their website, the Essex Village Board wrote it “… has issued a formal notice establishing development standards and mitigation requirements for a proposed data center facility that may be located within the village.”
It also posted a letter. The subject line says it is a notice about “development standards and required mitigation response plan” for a data center.
What they’re saying:
“Now, as far as buying that big land in Illinois, there could be multiple reasons. I don’t know what they’re going do with it,” said Mohammad Shahidapur, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Shahidapur has been teaching for 43 years.
Given his background, we asked him for his objective opinion as to what Constellation could be doing with all of this land.
“They could be building a big solar farm because having a nuclear unit, we can sort of reduce the issues because sun doesn’t shine all the time. So then once the sun is shining, you know, basically, they can sell that and then when the sun is not shining they can replace it by nuclear. That could be one reason. They could be also going after data centers in a sense maybe they’re lining up with some of these tech companies to build more data centers and providing power through their nuclear units, so it’s sort of a joint venture,” Shahidapur said
The statement Constellation sent us when our story first aired says in part: “Constellation is seeking to annex land into Essex near the Braidwood Clean Energy Center to help the company strategically market the facility’s carbon-free generation to potential future developers.”
“So, obviously, I’m not an insider at the company, but if I’m a betting man, I would bet based on buying a bunch of land, looking to annex it, that they’re looking to build out one of these data centers,” said Andrew Rocco, a stock strategist with Zacks Investment Research based in Chicago.
Rocco’s focus is on the tech industry and where it overlaps with the energy sector.
So we also asked him for his unofficial analysis on what he thinks Constellation may do with the 700 acres of land they purchased in and around Essex:
“Braidwood is the largest nuclear plant in Illinois. And as I mentioned before, getting these nuclear facilities through the regulatory red tape, even though kind of the Trump administration has said they’re pro-nuclear, but still there’s a ton of regulatory red tape and really nothing has been approved in the last 10 or 20 years. So having this already built out, I think it does around 2,400 megawatts of carbon-free baseload electricity. So this is exactly what these large tech companies are looking for. They’re looking for an immense amount of energy, dependable and clean. Now you can look at natural gas as an alternative to something like this, because obviously the startup costs are going to be lower for natural gas. And natural gas is very, very cheap. And it makes up the most amount of energy produced in the U.S. currently. But once you have a nuclear reactor already running, this one’s been running since the late 80s, you don’t have to worry about that. So the upfront costs have already been paid for. Now they’re looking likely to secure this large plot of land nearby to put a data center in and just connect it right up to that massive nuclear plant.”
Again — that is Rocco’s unofficial opinion on what Constellation may be doing with all that land.
Unit 32 reached out to Constellation to see if they would tell us what was going to happen with all of the land they bought in and around Essex. They told us that since they do not have a customer, they do not have any plans.
The Source: The information in this report came from interviews with Essex residents, statements from the Essex Village Board and Constellation Energy along with interviews with stock strategist Andrew Rocco and IIT professor Mohammad Shahidapur.
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