Bipartisan effort seeks stricter measures to protect sexual assault victims in schools

SPRINGFIELD — Even after the family of a victim of sexual assault from Taylorville obtained an emergency order of protection, the school still allowed the young girl’s assailant to attend the same school and merely moved him to a different school bus with younger students.

It was only after three weeks of filing multiple orders of protection in court and advocating on their daughter’s behalf that the girl’s parents were able to get the assailant removed from their daughter’s school.

In response to this mishandled incident, state Sen. Steven McClure, R-Springfield, introduced a bill in January to help combat sexual violence and protect victims in Illinois schools.

That bill, Senate Bill 98, was not assigned to a committee before the Senate committee deadline on March 21 — a necessary step in becoming a law. But McClure said he has not given up hope for the bill and has filed a letter requesting an extension on the bill past the deadline this session.

“It’s still very much in play,” McClure said Wednesday about the bill, which has gained bipartisan support.

SB 98 would amend the Illinois School Code to implement a mandatory one-year expulsion for any public school student who is determined by that district’s school board to have committed sexual assault, sexual harassment or engaged in a sexual activity without the consent of the other person. The bill specifies that it will include instances of sexual assault that occur in school or during any activities or events that “bear a reasonable relationship to the school.”

Approximately 82% of women in the United States have experienced sexual assault or sexual harassment, and 56% of women have experienced sexual assault before they turned 18, according to a 2024 study by Stop the Hate, a nonprofit organization dedicated to documenting and ending gender-based street harassment worldwide.

McClure said he filed the bill after a 10-year-old girl at Taylorville Junior High School in his district was sexually assaulted multiple times on her school bus by a 14-year-old boy and then later sexually assaulted again by that same boy at their school bus stop after the school did not take measures to separate the two students.

“I filed the bill to stick up for these kids. It’s not fair for somebody who gets raped to have to go to school the next day on the school bus with the same person who did that,” McClure said.

The mother of the young Taylorville girl who was assaulted has advocated for the bill.

“We have laws where a student gets expelled for bringing a weapon on school grounds. For my daughter, this young man’s body was his weapon, and he continually brought his weapon to school, on the bus and to the bus stop,” she said at a Capitol news conference earlier this year. “This is not acceptable.”

Officials at Taylorville Junior High School declined to comment on SB 98 and their handling of the girl’s case.

Sen. Terri Bryant, R-Murphysboro, who signed on as a co-sponsor to the bill, said that she supports the mandatory one-year expulsion but wishes it was more severe because of the high risk that many young girls face of being sexually assaulted.

“They shouldn’t be allowed to go back to a public school because students should be safe when they are at a public school,” Bryant said. “I have two sisters, and all three of us were sexually abused, so 100% of the girls in my immediate family were sexually assaulted.”

Sen. Jil Tracy, R-Quincy, a chief co-sponsor, said her decision to support the bill was largely influenced by a similar incident that happened in her school district, where a young girl was sexually assaulted by an older student on a school bus. The boy who allegedly assaulted the girl was still allowed to ride the bus with her, she said.

“The school officials didn’t like it, but they didn’t really have tools to deal with it,” Tracy said. She later explained that the girl was given a scholarship to attend a different school but still had to provide her own transportation to that school.

Carrie Ward, who is the CEO of the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault and has publicly backed SB 98, said her group is “routinely” contacted by students who have been sexually assaulted in a school or in a school-related setting.

Although Ward explained that she does not know whether the bill will help prevent further instances of sexual assault, she believes it will elevate the importance of addressing sexual assault in school and acknowledging its prevalence.

Senate Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford, D-Mayfield, one of the chief co-sponsors of the bill and the Chair of Assignments, said in a statement to Capitol News Illinois that while she fully supports the bill, she is “continuing to review legislation filed.”

McClure said he has worked with the Illinois Education Association — the powerful teachers union that is backing the bill — and several other educational organizations to craft amendments to the bill, which he plans to file as soon as the bill is assigned to a committee.

McClure said the amendments would give a school’s superintendent and members of the school board authority to make changes in an expulsion on a “case-by-case basis,” which McClure said was necessary to prevent court challenges to the legislation. Also, he said, the amendments would more clearly define sexual assault to account for the fact that in most schools, students are at an age where they cannot give consent.

Sen. Julie Morrison, D-Lake Forest, said she believes the bill addresses a bipartisan issue in an important way.

“If there’s one thing we can agree on, it’s that students should feel safe at school,” said Morrison, who also is a chief co-sponsor.

Athan Yanos is a graduate student in journalism with Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, and fellows 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.