One sentence in a 1,000-word news release caught my attention.
The subject was Monday’s announcement of more than $20 million in Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity grants to launch five new Manufacturing Training Academies at community colleges in East Peoria, Centralia, Mattoon, Godfrey and Champaign. This will follow similar investments in Normal, Belleville, Decatur and Kankakee.
The sentence, from Mark Denzler, who leads the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association: “We’re proud to partner with the governor and General Assembly to make these academies a reality and advance other important workforce development initiatives including apprenticeship tax credits, dual credit programs and a new law that expands access to hands-on-learning opportunities by allowing students to choose career and technical education classes in lieu of foreign language requirement.”
That law, Senate Bill 3080, cleared both chambers without a no vote in late May. It addressed an issue I’ve followed since January 2021: a state mandate that all high schoolers finish two years of world language study to graduate wasn’t the best fit given several challenges: teacher shortages, specifically in the subject area, an avenue for proper credit to students who study a second language in middle school, the missed opportunity to better integrate such lessons at younger grade levels and, perhaps most importantly, the difficulty of fitting all the high school minimums into four academic years.
That last item points directly back to Denzler’s statement regarding career/technical and dual credit classes. Does it all fit?
Without rehashing the entire academic history of four kids (ages 12 through 22), our family has a variety of experiences in juggling world languages, Advanced Placement courses, school music and the county technical campus. It’s been difficult to balance opportunities while remaining on track to meet the state’s minimum graduation requirements and the trickier matter of tracking transcript expectations for college applications.
Illinois has a robust community college system, and there are excellent vocational collaborative campuses in many regions, but the geography isn’t a perfect fit for everyone, which sometimes means super early mornings or jamming in lunch on the bus back to the regular school. Our public colleges don’t demand more from first-year applicants than the state considers minimum graduation benchmarks, but woe to the high school senior who learns their chosen school expects three full years each of social studies and science.
These are the kinds of challenges not easily solved in a 450-word newspaper column, nor should personal experience stand in as typical of what more than 500,000 high schoolers encounter each year. Making space for world language and career education was a wise step, but we’re capable of more by identifying pathways to get middle and high school kids earlier access to different opportunities.
• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Local News Network. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.
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September 17, 2026 at 10:04AM
Illinois Delivered 