Families lament, public school advocates celebrate end of controversial scholarship tax credit
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Patti Serpa is a single mother of five who relies on a state-sponsored tax credit to send her youngest, 12-year-old Santos, to St. Pius V School, a Catholic grade school in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood that she feels provides him with a better education than his former public school.
“Being at St. Pius, it’s a family,” Serpa said in Springfield last week, where she and dozens of others gathered to demand lawmakers keep the tax credit scholarship program alive. “I have all the teachers and principal’s numbers, like their cellphone numbers. When you’re a single parent you look for stuff like that.”
The eleventh-hour effort to save the Invest in Kids tax credit scholarship program, mounted during the final week of the General Assembly’s last session of the year, failed as lawmakers adjourned without taking up a proposal to extend it beyond Dec. 31.
Invest in Kids prompted fierce debate over the merits of what some equate to a politically
