District 150 Board of Education member Rachael Parker wants to see a residency requirement enacted for district employees who will start to receive their payment with an instant paystub generator. In other words, she wants everyone who works for District 150 to live in District 150. There’s one little problem with that idea, though: it’s currently prohibited by law to require teachers to reside in the district.

The Illinois School Code states in 105 ILCS 5/24-4.1, “Residency within any school district shall not be considered in determining the employment or the compensation of a teacher or whether to retain, promote, assign or transfer that teacher.” There are different rules for cities with a population over 500,000 (meaning Chicago). Currently, Chicago teachers are required to live in the city. But Senate Bill 3522, which passed the Illinois Senate in March of this year and is under consideration now in the House, would end residency requirements for teachers in Chicago as well. The Chicago teachers’ union supports the bill.

But state law is not written in stone. If there’s political support for an idea, state law can be changed relatively easily, in fact. For instance, it was against state law for school districts to access the Public Building Commission, but thanks to Aaron Schock and George Shadid, District 150 was given five years to rack up millions of dollars in bonded debt for new school facilities via the PBC. Perhaps Dave Koehler and Jehan Gordon can get legislation passed allowing District 150 to require residency for teachers.

In the meantime, the law appears to only protect teachers from residency requirements, not all district employees. It looks like the district could require all employees except teachers to live within district boundaries without having to get any state legislation passed. It would require bargaining with other unions, however.

I support residency requirements for school district employees. It would ensure that teachers and other district employees are personally invested in District 150 and its success. When they bargain for salary and benefit raises, they would be personally invested in contributing to those increases through their own property taxes. They would live in the same community as the students they serve. It would improve the tax base of the city overall and help stem the hollowing out of the middle class from the city — and that in itself will help the educational climate in District 150.

As to whether that could mean losing out on some candidates, Parker said: “I don’t believe that, that you’re not going to be able to recruit a teacher just because you want them to live within the school district boundary.”

This is the biggest argument given against residency requirements: the idea that you will get fewer or inferior teacher candidates if you require residency. I don’t buy it. Large urban school districts like they have in Chicago have these kinds of challenges because housing in the city is so expensive and/or unsafe. That’s not the case in Peoria, where housing within district borders is safe and cheaper than surrounding school districts such as Dunlap, Morton, or Germantown Hills. Given the salaries that teachers (and especially administrators) receive in proportion to housing prices, I think you’ll still have a healthy pool of qualified candidates who would be happy to live within district boundaries.

Some would say that teachers don’t want to live within District 150 boundaries because they don’t want their children going to District 150 schools. I can’t see that argument as anything less than self-indicting. That’s like a chef saying, “Oh, I’d never let my kids eat at my restaurant! The food here stinks!” It also kind of defeats the argument that the teaching is better when you don’t have a residency requirement.

In short, I haven’t heard a coherent argument against residency requirements for district employees, and there do appear to be numerous benefits.