Will County Gazette

Crete Monee School District 201-U will receive $13,092,405 million in federal COVID-19 relief funding, according to a government official, but Republican politicians are skeptical.

“We will eventually have to pay taxes on that money,” said George Pearson, chairman of the Will County Republican Party. “It’s not money sitting in the bank somewhere with the federal government. Somebody will have to pay the cost off. We will pay interest rates and taxes with this so-called rescue plan.”

The $13 million comes from the federal American Rescue Plan, which requires that 20% of the funding be used to address learning loss over the next 3.5 years.

“These dollars are distributed based on Title 1 information,” State Rep. Will Davis (D-District 30) said. “Title 1 is the federal designation for low-income students. There is a formula that's used to determine how much in Title 1 funding a school district receives.”

Lincoln-Way area schools will receive about $1.6 million and Plainfield area schools $21.4 million, Davis told Will County Gazette.

Last week, on Election Day, residents voted against a $62.5 million school board referendum that would have provided funding to build an elementary school in Crete and to rebuild Coretta Scott King magnet school, which serves students from Crete, Monee, Park Forest and University Park.

“This is a win for transparency and government,” Pearson said. “You cannot expect voters to go along with reckless spending without accountability.”

Pearson said he would like to see school districts pool their resources and lower property taxes by creating grade centers instead of building new schools in specific towns.

“If you build a grade center, you now force everybody from these communities to come together but if we're spending money to keep students separated in their own township schools, it's not money well spent because keeping children separated by town will grow racism,” he said.

Pearson added that he pitched the idea of building shared grade centers to two Crete-Monee School District 201-U board members, who discussed it at the last two meetings without support as of yet.

“Each township wants a brand new school when I am requesting a kindergarten through fifth-grade center in one town, a junior high in a neighboring town, and a high school in an adjacent town so that white, black, Hispanic, and Asian kids go to school and grow up together," he said. "If they come together in junior high having never interacted with one another, you're asking for a race riot. You're asking for attitudes.”