CHICAGO — This time every year, Sandra Taylor finds herself in a predicament that is not unusual for people in her profession. Like most other school support staff, her paychecks stop once summer break begins. To prepare, she and her coworkers rely on food pantries and grocery sales to stock up on household essentials.

“Bills do not stop because we’re not working, you know? So we’ve got to find a way,” said Taylor, 57, a food service worker at Galesburg High School in Knox County, who said she has worked for the district for 20 years.

The Illinois General Assembly is considering helping educational support staff workers like Taylor whose incomes dry up each summer by allowing them to collect unemployment benefits between academic terms beginning on June 1.

The measures creating the Unemployment Equity Act – House Bill 4416 and Senate Bill 3286 – stalled in committee, but the bill’s union backers and its House sponsor say it could still advance in the final two weeks of the legislative session.

“The discussion we’re having now is how expensive it is,” House sponsor Rep. Marcus Evans, D-Chicago, said. “Is it a Maserati or a Camry? I think it’s a Camry.”

Evans said that, although HB 4416 has stalled, he plans to incorporate its language into an omnibus bill at the end of the session. Legislators commonly package multiple spending measures that are unlikely to pass on their own into a single bill they hope will pass because it contains other measures legislators support.

But the measure is hotly contested by school districts, who say the state should foot the bill rather than putting the onus on districts.

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In a fiscal note added to HB 4416, the Illinois Department of Employment Security pulled data from when the law was changed in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic to estimate that it would cost between $138 million and $176 million annually, with an additional $3.6 million for implementation. Public schools, colleges, universities and not-for-profit academic institutions would bear approximately 93% of this cost, according to IDES.

What the legislation does

Employees with a “reasonable assurance” of returning to employment are typically excluded from collecting unemployment benefits. The bills would keep the language of reasonable assurance but exempt educational support staff from the requirement.

“Currently, non-instructional educational staff do not have access to unemployment benefits during the summer and other school breaks, leaving them without the ability to pay their bills at a time when the cost of living is on the rise,” said Sen. Ram Villavalam, D-Chicago, who is sponsoring the Senate bill.

The bills give paraprofessionals, bus drivers, secretaries, cooks and cafeteria workers, health care aides, safety and security staff, and other noninstructional public school employees a maximum of 47% of their weekly earnings for the 10 to 11 weeks school is not in session.

Supporters include union groups like the AFL-CIO, AFSCME Council 31, Illinois Education Association, Illinois Federation of Teachers, Chicago Teachers Union 1 and SEIU Local 73.

“It’s a matter of fairness,” said Alyssa Goodstein, communications director for the AFL-CIO. “Workers doing the exact same job in the private sector are eligible for benefits that the same worker in a public job is not.”

A study by the Illinois Association of Regional Superintendents for Schools found 2,755 paraprofessional vacancies for the 2023–2024 school year. The AFL-CIO said providing unemployment benefits to teachers assistants and aides will help provide stability to school districts that struggle to fill these positions.

Megan Accardo, 39, a paraprofessional in Grayslake, said she has seen many of her coworkers move to the private sector, where they receive higher pay and qualify for summer benefits.

“It pains me to see people come up to me at the end of the year and be like, ‘I love my job, but I gotta go. I can’t afford to stay here,’” she said. “I could leave and go do the same exact thing I’m doing in the private sector and get unemployment in the summer. We are losing people all the time.”

Cost and opposition

Illinois extended unemployment benefits to school support staff in 2020, with costs substantially offset by federal pandemic relief programs, which expired in September 2021.

Other states have considered similar legislation, but only Oregon and Minnesota have permanently extended unemployment benefits to school support staff. In 2023, the Minnesota Department of Education estimated that the actual cost of benefits given out constituted about one-third of the funding allocated by the state for school districts.

Using data from implementation of the Minnesota unemployment benefits, the Economic Policy Institute estimated that a similar bill would cost Illinois school districts $56.3 million. This figure omits implementation costs and unemployment take-up by colleges and university employees, although these figures are likely to represent a relatively small percentage of the total compared to school districts.

However, a 2025 news release by the Minnesota School Boards Association pointed to a 25% increase in unemployment claims the year after the Minnesota Department of Education’s initial survey estimating costs. The news release also attributes an increase in late-summer resignations by paraprofessionals on the extension of unemployment benefits.

“This would become a permanent cost for school districts. That’s different than in Minnesota because they allocated funding for it,” said Sarah Miller, associate executive director of government relations at the Illinois Association of School Boards. “We’ve conveyed that there needs to be state funding.”

In the meantime, workers like Accardo and Taylor prepare for another summer without pay.

Accardo said her kids have never been on a real vacation, and she dreads telling them they probably will not be able to go on a trip this year either.

Taylor has already started budgeting, having learned with experience that she will not have much success trying to get a job over the summer since she said most employers want workers who can commit for more than a few months. She has resorted to taking out personal loans in the past instead.

Taylor said she cannot imagine a summer free of the anxieties caused by having no income.

“It would be so wonderful to not have to stress or anything. After 20 years, I would probably break down and cry,” she said. “Most people don’t understand. For all of my coworkers, that would mean so much. Most of them would probably just start crying.”

Molly A. Wallace is a graduate student in journalism with Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications, and is a fellow in its Medill Illinois News Bureau working in partnership with Capitol News Illinois.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.