In late January 2026, Illinois State Senator Steve McClure (R-Springfield) introduced Senate Bill 2991, renewing his push to require the expulsion of any student found responsible for sexually assaulting another student in a school setting.

The bill would amend the Illinois School Code to mandate that a student determined by a school board to have committed sexual violence, sexual assault, or non-consensual sexual activity at school, at a school-sponsored event, or at any activity reasonably related to school be expelled for at least one year, with placement in an alternative education program rather than remaining at the victim’s school.

Superintendents would retain case-by-case authority to modify the expulsion, mirroring the flexibility already built into existing weapons-expulsion provisions.

This is not McClure’s first attempt. In January 2025, he introduced Senate Bill 98, which sought the same basic outcome. I wrote about that bill last year in an article titled “Out of Control,” in which I argued that SB 98 was a step in the right direction but was “full of holes, far too little, and way too late.”

SB 98 stalled in the Assignments Committee. SB 2991 is the reworked version, refined through negotiations with the Illinois Education Association and the Illinois Principals Association, and drafted with tighter definitions of the triggering conduct—specifically tying non-consensual sexual activity to the use or threat of force and to an “attempted sexual assault” standard that requires a substantial step with intent.

Where SB 98 used broader, more skeletal language, SB 2991 conforms to the existing weapons-expulsion framework. It spells out how the superintendent can modify the one-year minimum, and how the school board can do so upon further review.

The legislation was prompted by a case in Christian County in which a middle school girl was repeatedly attacked and sexually assaulted by an older student on a school bus serving Taylorville Junior High School.

The assailant admitted to the assaults.

Despite that admission, the school neither expelled nor suspended him. The victim’s family was forced to obtain a court order of protection just to keep their daughter safe at school, and even then, implementing a safety plan became, as the mother described it, a fiasco that dragged on for weeks. The perpetrator was eventually sent to an alternative school but was allowed to return to Taylorville Junior High the following year.

That case is not isolated.

McClure has said he could name virtually any district in the state and guarantee it has dealt with this problem. Families in multiple counties have told lawmakers they pulled their children from public schools after districts refused to expel or suspend alleged attackers.

Recent Illinois litigation tells a similar story: Homewood-Flossmoor High School District 233 paid a $3.5 million settlement after a classmate sexually assaulted a student during a theater class, and the district mishandled the response.

A lawsuit against Victor J. Andrew High School in District 230 alleges administrators allowed a male student with a history of harassment to continue interacting with female students, leading to an assault. These are just the cases that become public.

The available data make clear that peer-on-peer sexual violence in Illinois schools is not rare.

A statewide summary of CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey data found that approximately 11.6% of Illinois high school students reported experiencing sexual violence—unwanted physical sexual contact, not just verbal harassment—within the past 12 months.

About 8.8% reported being physically forced to have sexual intercourse at some point in their lives, with the rate for girls (15.4%) far exceeding that for boys (4.2%).

An Illinois-linked middle school study found that more than one in five students—21%—reported being inappropriately touched against their will at school. These figures do not even capture grooming, coercive sexting, or situations where a student appears to “consent” under emotional pressure, power imbalances, or fear of social consequences.

When sexual exploitation is defined that broadly, experts believe the true prevalence is substantially higher than published assault statistics indicate.

McClure’s bill addresses a real and indefensible gap in Illinois law. The state already mandates a minimum one-year expulsion for a student who brings a firearm, knife, or brass knuckles to school.

There is no logical reason why sexually assaulting another child should be treated less seriously than possessing a weapon.

On that core point, the bill is correct, and the support it has drawn from the Illinois Education Association, the Illinois Principals Association, and the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault reflects a genuine consensus that the current system is failing victims.

But the bill hard-wires a severe, mandatory sanction onto the back end of a process—the school district’s investigation and adjudication—without addressing the process itself.

And the process is where the real deficiency lies.

Under Title IX and current Illinois law, school districts must promptly and impartially investigate allegations of sexual misconduct, provide written notice to both parties, gather evidence, apply a defined standard of proof, issue a written determination, and offer appeal rights. But the regulations say little about who must conduct the investigation or how rigorous it must be.

In many districts—particularly smaller ones—the “investigator” is a principal or assistant principal with minimal specialized training, juggling dozens of other responsibilities. In a large district, the same case might be handled by a dedicated Title IX office staffed by experienced professionals.

The result is a system in which one district’s process resembles a serious quasi-judicial inquiry, while another’s resembles a rushed conversation in the principal’s office.

Tying a mandatory one-year expulsion to whatever finding emerges from that wildly uneven machinery amplifies every weakness in the front end of the process. You can’t have a fair system that allows one district to have Barney Fife as an investigator and another to have Columbo.

SB 2991 would be substantially stronger—and fairer to both victims and accused students—if it set clear standards for investigations and adjudications with the same specificity it applies to punishment. Several reforms would close the gap:

Professional investigators. Allegations of sexual assault in a school setting should not be investigated by building administrators who also serve as detectives. The bill should require that investigations be conducted by professional investigators—at a minimum, individuals holding an Illinois private detective license —or by law enforcement with specialized training in juvenile sexual offenses. A professional investigator brings training in evidence preservation, witness interviewing, and impartial fact-finding that most principals lack.

Board counsel as intermediary. The investigator’s findings and report should be delivered to the school board through the board’s legal counsel, not filtered through building-level administrators who may have institutional interests in minimizing findings. Counsel can evaluate the legal sufficiency of the evidence, ensure the investigation followed proper procedures, and present the case to the board in a form that supports informed decision-making.

A formal adjudicatory hearing. Rather than leaving the “determination” to a board meeting that may or may not involve adversarial testing of evidence, the bill should require a formal hearing before a qualified hearing officer—ideally a retired judge—at which the case is presented by a designated prosecutor (which could be board counsel or an outside attorney) and the accused student has the right to defense counsel, to confront witnesses, and to present evidence. The hearing officer’s findings and recommendations would then be referred to the school board for final action. This is not a criminal trial, but it is a process commensurate with the severity of the consequences: branding a minor as a sexual assailant and removing them from their school for a year or more.

Clear and convincing evidence standard. Most Illinois K-12 districts currently use the “preponderance of the evidence” standard—essentially, “more likely than not,” or anything above 50%. That standard may be appropriate for garden-variety school discipline, but when the finding triggers a mandatory long-term expulsion and carries the stigma of a sexual assault determination, a higher bar is warranted. The bill should require that responsibility be established by “clear and convincing evidence”—a standard that demands a high probability, well above a bare majority of the evidence, but still below the “beyond a reasonable doubt” threshold used in criminal cases. This protects victims by ensuring that substantiated cases rest on solid evidentiary ground and protects accused students from life-altering consequences based on thin or contested evidence developed through an uneven process.

Without these procedural upgrades, SB 2991 risks two kinds of injustice.

In districts with weak investigative capacity and low evidentiary thresholds, innocent students could be expelled based on shoddy fact-finding. In districts that recognize the weight of the consequences and lack confidence in their own processes, administrators may be even more reluctant to pursue cases at all, knowing that a finding of responsibility now automatically triggers a severe sanction they cannot mitigate.

Either outcome defeats the purpose of the legislation.

McClure is right that Illinois law has an indefensible gap. He is also right that sexual assault should be treated at least as seriously as bringing a weapon to school. But if the state is going to mandate a punishment of this severity, it owes both victims and accused students a process worthy of that severity.

Professional investigators, formal hearings, legal representation, and a clear-and-convincing-evidence standard would make SB 2991 not just a statement of principle but a law that actually works.