Bills 'Trump Proofing' Student Civil Rights In IL Would Ban School Fines

ILLINOIS — State lawmakers this week put forth a proposal to ban schools from fining students for municipal violations.

House Bill 2502 and Senate Bill 1519 would prohibit schools from fining, ticketing or citing students for such a violation and from referring students to police for a fine or fee.

The move follows a 2022 investigation from the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica called “The Price Kids Pay,” which found districts avoid a state ban on fining students by calling police to cite them for ordinance violations, according to the Tribune, which noted Black students were twice more likely than white students to receive tickets at school.

“If the student is caught vaping, what benefit to the student is there to have the student get a ticket? The benefit is recognizing that there may be a problem and possibly referring the student to help,” state Rep. La Shawn Ford, a Chicago Democrat and the bill’s House sponsor, said, according to Capitol News Illinois. “And so, our goal is to help students and not lead them down a path of what we all have heard, the school prison pipeline.”

The bill would stop fines for ordinance violations such as vaping and disorderly conduct, Aimee Galvin, government affairs director at Stand for Children Illinois, told the outlet.

“Assaulting a teacher, not a municipal ordinance violation,” she said, according to Capitol News Illinois. “That’s a serious crime, in which case school districts would still be allowed to engage with police for a serious crime like that and with guns, weapon, and drugs.”

The bills would also require each district to report annually how many students were referred to police and how many referrals students received.

Galvin told the Tribune that tracking police involvement served as “Trump proofing” for student civil rights.

“We would like to see this data in Illinois,” she told the newspaper. “If policy were to change at the (U.S. Department of Education), we would lose all data about how schools are interacting with law enforcement, and that is really concerning to us.”