It is usually instructive, and always amusing, when politicians are hoisted on their own rhetorical petards. The movement to downsize government has spread across the country like a contagion, and swept through Springfield last spring when Republicans controlled, for the first time in a generation, every office in the Capitol not labeled "minority leader."

Spurred by the fever pitch of deregulation, decentralization and devolution, the General Assembly enacted a law to ease the regulatory ordeals imposed on school districts and return some power to local officials. Lawmakers said school districts could seek legislative approval to ignore state regulations they consider burdensome.

Reality caught up with rhetoric during the General Assembly's fall veto session when school districts by the score sought legislative permission to get out from under a variety of state rules.

Illinoisans are pioneers of sorts in this area. The National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks legislative action around the country, has no record of other states allowing schools to seek such waivers from state regulation. So lawmakers had no idea of the pitfalls they could expect.

Turns out that the regulations many districts considered a burden were those that others — legislators included — considered protections for the health and safety of children. The one that prohibits school officials from spanking students, for instance. Or the one that forced them to include certain safety features — sprinklers, for example — in school buildings.

"I wouldn't in my wildest dreams have predicted requests for waivers of the ban on corporal punishment or the requirement that schools have fire sprinkler systems," says Rep. Mary Lou Cowlishaw, who chairs the House Education Committee.

So swamped were legislators with waiver requests that they are now rethinking the wisdom of their deregulatory ways. Sen. Arthur Berman, minority spokesman for the Senate Education Committee, plans to introduce a bill this year to repair flaws he sees in the current law. In the meantime, Cowlishaw is just glad Illinois had the gumption to try something new.

"When it's the first time something's been done," she says, "you just don't know what's around the bend."

Like an oncoming train.

Jennifer Halperin

One downstate newspaper ran the headline: "Convicted murderer goes free." But the release of Alex Hernandez from prison, like the earlier release of Rolando Cruz, was not a Willie Hortonesque case of dangerous felons walking the streets; it was the latest chapter in an ongoing, bizarre and tragic murder mystery.

True, both Hernandez and Cruz were twice convicted in the rape and slaying of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico of Naperville in 1983. Both at one time resided on death row.

Yet the Illinois Supreme Court twice overturned their convictions. And in November Cruz was freed when a DuPage County judge granted a directed verdict for acquittal after concluding prosecutors had failed to prove their case in Cruz' third trial. Last month, the DuPage County state's attorney's office dropped charges against Hernandez, though officials said new evidence could cause them to reinstate their case against Hernandez, who has already served more than 11 years in prison.

Throughout the ordeal, one ongoing mystery has been the dogged pursuit of Cruz and Hernandez by the DuPage County state's attorney despite the confession of convicted child-killer Brian Dugan that he alone was responsible for the Nicarico girl's death. Attorney General Jim Ryan twice prosecuted Cruz while state's attorney in DuPage County.

Now a new chapter has opened with the announcement in mid-December that the U.S. Justice Department would conduct a "limited investigation" into the prosecution of Cruz. "The Civil Rights Division has decided to open limited investigation into the Cruz matter," a department spokesperson told The Associated Press.

A spokesperson for Ryan told the news service that the attorney general would "welcome any review the Justice Department would decide is necessary."

Donald Sevener

8 * January 1996 Illinois Issues

This cabin, built at the time of the Civil War, used to sit near Silver Creek in St. Clair County. For most of its history it belonged to the Nicholas Kiel family, immigrants from Germany.

But it stood in the way of progress, which scarcely pays any mind to history. Specifically, the cabin stood on land progress wanted for a runway that will help convert Scott Air Force Base into a joint military-commercial air field. Progress won out, but so did history. The Illinois Department of Transportation and the St. Clair Airport Authority moved the pioneer homestead three miles from where the Kiels made their home on timberland near Mascoutah.

Mike McCue, chief of aviation planning and programming for IDOT, says the expansion of Scott AFB to handle civilian air traffic is "within budget and on schedule" for completion during the fall of 1997. The General Assembly authorized $60 million in 1993 as the state's share of the $307.5 million project to allow Scott AFB, which employs more than 10,000 people, to remain open by making it available for commercial as well as military use.

Still, Scott was on the list of military bases for possible closure. Last summer the federal Base Realignment Commission chaired by former U.S. Sen. Alan Dixon recommended that Scott remain open and that the Illinois Air National Guard unit based at O'Hare Airport in Chicago be relocated to the expanded Scott air base. That relocation will solve some of O'Hare's congestion and allow a national guard unit to remain in Illinois, according to Bob Coverdale, director of transportation for St. Clair County. Coverdale says a $90 million housing project to supply 800 new homes for air force personnel has created as many as 250 new jobs in the Metro East area. Before the new commercial runway could be built, the transportation department's archaeologists were required by law to survey the site. IDOT's chief archaeologist, John Walthall, determined the Kiel cabin's authenticity as a pioneer homestead. To save a piece of Illinois' early history, the state sold the log cabin to the Mascoutah Historical Society for $1 and helped move it three miles to its new home in the Mascoutah City Park. The state's archaeologists identified more than 100 Native American and early Scot-Irish and German settlements on the expanded airport's land.

Photograph courtesy Mascoutah Historical Society To save a piece of Illinois' early history, the state sold this log cabin to the Mascoutah Historical Society for $1 and then helped move it.

Beverley Scobell

If current Illinois law had applied to Henry VIII's attempt to divorce Catherine of Aragon, the divorce would have been granted — and the Anglican and Episcopalian churches as we know them today might not exist.

The case was heard in a fictional trial at a November benefit dinner for the Chicago Humanities Festival. Both sides had dream teams of Chicago divorce lawyers, Illinois Supreme Court Justice Mary Ann McMorrow presided and the jury was evenly divided between men and women. According to the report in the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, Catherine got most of the property.

F. Mark Siebert

Illinois Issues January 1996 * 9

Briefly

Reports in mid-December showing jobless rates climbing both in Illinois and nationally underscored how fragile economic growth is. November unemployment rose to 5 percent in Illinois from 4.8 percent the month before, an addition of about 10,000 workers to the jobless rolls.

Meanwhile, the more seismic, and long-term, shift in the Illinois economy continues to blur future job prospects for a number of job-seekers. Longtime workers whose companies have downsized, farmers forced to leave their land, young people just out of high school looking for their first job (as well as dropouts who never quite made it) are all competing for jobs that may not even have had names a few years ago. At the same time, employers search desperately for competent employees, but the traditional sources for new hires may not be the best place to look in this new and still-changing world.

Now, the state has opened a new door to the workplace.

In a cooperative effort, four state agencies joined to produce a directory for job-seekers, employers, employment counselors and others concerned with linking potential workers with work. The 155-page document, entitled Doorways to Jobs (published in June 1995), was put together by the Job Training Coordinating Council, the Department of Employment Security, the Department of Commerce and Community Affairs and the Department of Public Aid.

For each of the 50-plus programs included, the directory provides a summary, the planning process for awarding funds, eligibility requirements and the kinds of activities included.

For instance, "AFDC JOBS Opportunities" is run by the Department of Public Aid and emphasizes education and training through the community college system. Eligible participants include low-income persons, high school dropouts and unemployed, displaced or dislocated workers. Major activities involve classroom training and job placement.

The directory also has a section of local contacts, by county, for major job training and related programs.

Anna Merritt

The Chicago Board of Education has endorsed a "new paradigm" that has been old hat to many rural school districts in downstate Illinois: small schools.

As population has dwindled in rural areas throughout the state, small towns have often fought state bureaucrats who attempted to force consolidation of school systems considered too small to offer a comprehensive educational curriculum. Teachers and small district administrators retorted that the smaller, more intimate environment is conducive to a better assessment of students' needs and more personal attention in meeting those needs.

That small town idea has now gained a foothold in the big city.

The Small Schools Workshop, begun four years ago through the University of Illinois at Chicago, helps Chicago public schools create an alternative to the sprawling, 2,000-plus-student schools by forming smaller schools that have no more than 300 students. Some of the 40 small schools created through the project are within larger schools, and some are independent. Sarah Howard is one of five teachers at Comets, a small school within Harper High School, which has 1,500 students on Chicago's South Side. She says Comets is five classrooms at the end of a hallway where the small staff teaches 140 students five of their seven classes each day from sophomore through senior years.

Mike Klonsky of LJIC says early studies convinced the school board that the small schools experiment not only leads to better attendance and test scores, but it is also more cost efficient. He says the Chicago School Board is backing its endorsement with money to expand the movement.

Beverley Scobell

10 * January 1996 Illinois Issues

Sue and John Adams, who farm 1,100 acres of corn and soybeans in Logan County, hear many interesting questions about farmers and farming when they visit Chippewa Grade School in Palos Heights a couple times a year. In between visits, the Adams family exchanges letters with a class of fourth-graders, building an understanding of agriculture and how it is part of the students' lives.

The Adamses are part of an Illinois Farm Bureau program called Adopt a Classroom. The Farm Bureau matches farm families to elementary and middle school teachers who want firsthand knowledge of farming practices taught to their students. This year the Farm Bureau matched nearly 200 teachers with farmers, with almost a hundred other teachers wanting a link with a farm family. John Ireland teaches fifth grade at Jane Addams School, a primarily Hispanic elementary school on Chicago's Southeast Side. He says his kids learned a lot from their contact with Trish Pestka of Hartsburg. They were surprised to find out how hard farm work is and that farmers use advanced technology. "They tend to think of farming as something done only in the past," says Ireland. It was interesting, he says, to watch them learn that farm kids are very much like them, including sharing their zeal for Sega and videos.

Photograph courtesy of the Adamses. John and Susan Adams took a live Christmas tree grown on their farm to a class of second-graders in Palos Heights. The students replanted it in their school yard in the spring.

Sue Adams has found the same lack of understanding about farm life among fourth-graders in the upper-middle-class community of Palos Heights in the southern suburbs. Do farmers, one student wondered, have televisions?

Beverley Scobell

THE RAPID growth of technology sometimes seems on a collision course with cherished rights. When the drafters of the Bill of Rights wrote the Fourth Amendment to make us secure in our "persons, houses, papers, and effects," they could not have foreseen modern electronic communications.

Since late in the last century, courts and legislatures have developed the concept of a "right to privacy" based on the Fourth Amendment. It requires constant shaping. Eavesdropping on cellular phone calls has already come under scrutiny. Illinois' Senate Bill 721, passed by the legislature in November, is the latest example. Its provisions for notifying residents of the presence of convicted sex offenders in their neighborhoods got most of the press attention, but another provision has drawn the opposition of civil libertarians, labor and some lawyers.

The bill permits certain businesses to use "a monitoring system ... for the purposes of service quality control." The ostensible purpose is monitoring of employee performance by telemarketing firms. The broad language has been seen by critics as allowing companies a "big brother is watching" intrusion into almost all employee activities.

Unfazed by civil libertarian concerns, Gov. Jim Edgar signed the bill into law in December.

F. Mark Scobell

Outside Illinois' 2nd Congressional District, John Morrow may not have as much name recognition as Democrat Jesse Jackson Jr., who won the special general election in December to replace convicted former U.S. Rep. Mel Reynolds. Morrow finished fifth in the November primary.

Nevertheless, he carries the distinction of being the only candidate of the five Democrats and four Republicans who took the 1995 Congressional National Political Awareness Test. The test gave the public a checklist of Morrow's stands on issues ranging from crime and illegal drugs, to health care and welfare, to congressional reform and legislative priorities. The National Political Awareness Test is just one of the services provided to the public, free of charge, by Project Vote Smart.

Project Vote Smart also provides information about the candidates in all national and state elections: voting records, campaign finance data, biographical information and positions on issues. Information on candidates, elected officials, issues and the political system are as easy as dialing the toll-free Hotline at 1-800-622-7627.

Project Vote Smart is a nonpartisan organization founded in 1988 by former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, along with other national leaders, to give the public a source of unbiased information about government and its leaders. It is funded by private individuals and nonaffiliated foundations. Other services include publications and online service, which voters can find on the World Wide Web at http://www.vote-smart.org

Beverley Scobell

Illinois Issues January 1996 * 11