Illinois State Board of Education wants to revamp how it counts low-income students

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (Capitol News Illinois) — The Illinois State Board of Education is asking lawmakers this year for $200,000 to develop a new way of counting low-income students.

Although that’s only a small fraction of the overall $10.9 billion general revenue fund budget the agency is seeking to fund preK-12 public schools next year, the request points to a larger issue that public schools could be facing over the next several years as the number of students officially counted as “low-income” is expected to drop.

That’s because Illinois currently counts low-income students based on their enrollment in federal support programs, including Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

However, under new eligibility rules that were part of the federal budget law Congress passed last year known as H.R. 1, or the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” the number of people enrolled in those programs is expected to decline.

Those include changes to SNAP eligibility that went into effect May 1 that disqualify many groups of noncitizens and impose new work requirements on many able-bodied adults.

Although the rules mainly affect adults and therefore aren’t expected to have an immediate impact on students, officials believe they could eventually cause entire households to become unenrolled in federal aid programs, resulting in fewer children being enrolled as well in future years.

“We believe we have time to come up with an alternative method,” Robin Steans, executive director of the education research and advocacy group Advance Illinois, said in an interview.

The changes in federal eligibility rules for Medicaid, SNAP and other federal programs could have a direct impact on the amount of state funding many districts receive through the Evidence-Based Funding formula.

That’s the formula that lawmakers adopted in 2017 that calls for $300 million in additional funding for public schools each year, with the bulk of that money earmarked for the least adequately funded districts.

The formula uses several factors to determine an “adequacy target” for each district, including the number of teachers and paraprofessionals a district needs based on its enrollment and demographic factors.

For example, for kindergarten through third-grade classes, the statute says each district should receive funding for one full-time equivalent teacher for 15 low-income students, and one for every 20 non-low-income students. For grades 4-12, the formula calls for one teacher for every 20 low-income students and one for every 25 non-low-income students.

According to data from the state’s 2025 report card, there were just over 1.8 million students enrolled in Illinois public schools during the 2024-25 school year. Of those, 49.7%, or 933,470, were classified as low-income.

The highest concentration of low-income students for any single district was in Carbon Cliff-Barstow School District 36, in the Quad Cities region, which reported 100% of its students qualified as low-income. Lake Forest School District 67, in Lake County, reported only 1.3% of its students were low-income.

Although many observers say they do not expect the changes in eligibility rules to have an immediate impact on districts’ official poverty rates, they do note that overall enrollment in Medicaid and SNAP has been declining in recent years, for reasons they say they cannot yet explain.

According to data from the Illinois Department of Human Services, fewer than 1.7 million people in the state were receiving SNAP benefits in March 2026. That’s down 13.7% from a year earlier, and 17.8% from March 2023.

Likewise, according to the Department of Healthcare and Family Services, Medicaid enrollment in Illinois in fiscal year 2025, at 3.26 million, was down 5.7% compared to the year before, and 18% lower than it was in fiscal year 2023.

“It’s the right time for the state to explore (other methodologies),” Steans said, noting that the declining enrollment rates “don’t comport with our lived experiences.”

(Reporting by Peter Hancock, Capitol News Illinois)

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