Chicago City Wire

Shannon Adcock, president of Awake Illinois, expressed concerns about a proposed law that she says would classify unregistered homeschoolers as truants, thus allowing state investigations. Her statement was made on the Prairie State Wire Podcast.

"When it was initially drawn, it was going to criminalize parents," said Adcock. "Who do not register with the state or with their local school district. Consider those children truant. Government could knock on their door and investigate them."

Illinois lawmakers introduced House Bill 2827 in 2024 to enhance oversight of homeschooling. The bill requires families to submit an annual declaration to local school districts and provide educational portfolios if contacted by truancy officers. According to Capitol News Illinois, non-compliance could result in a child being classified as truant. Proponents argue the bill is designed to protect vulnerable students, while opponents claim it infringes on parental rights and leads to unnecessary state intervention in home education.

According to Johns Hopkins University’s Homeschool Hub, approximately 4.85% of Illinois students were homeschooled during the 2022–23 school year, with a slight decrease to 4.53% in 2023–24. Unlike states with mandatory registration, Illinois does not require families to report their homeschooling status, complicating tracking efforts. Despite this lack of reporting requirements, homeschooling rates nearly doubled from 2.1% to 5.4% during the pandemic in 2020.

The American Institutes for Research (AIR) reported in 2023 that more states have expanded chronic absenteeism monitoring systems that can lead to truancy investigations for unregistered homeschoolers. HB 2827 proposes that failure to submit required documentation may automatically trigger such investigations. According to AIR, these developments reflect increasing concerns over educational accountability and child welfare within home-based learning environments.

Adcock is a University of Illinois graduate and longtime education advocate based in Naperville. As reported by the DuPage Policy Journal, she has criticized HB 2827 as an "attack on homeschool and private school" families and leads grassroots campaigns opposing state intervention in parental education choices. Adcock has also filed federal civil rights complaints challenging Illinois school policies.

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FULL, UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT

Brian Hyde: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Prairie State Wire Podcast. I'm Brian Hyde, and today I welcome Shannon Adcock. Shannon is the founder of Awake Illinois. And Shannon, I know that's just one of multiple hats that you wear, but um, for those who are meeting you for the very first time, take a moment to tell us just a little bit about, uh, yourself and your background.

Shannon Adcock: Sure. Well thank you Brian for the invitation to this podcast. Uh, grateful to speak to you and your audience. So I am a mom here in Illinois. I live in Naperville, and my husband and I are born and raised in Illinois. We left for about 12 years, had our children in Arizona and came back here in 2015. And, uh, you know, we were always proud to be from the land of Lincoln and in the Midwest.

Uh, you know, I think Illinois is just a great place to raise a family, but unfortunately in 2020 when I saw the negative effects of lockdowns, the lacking logic behind them, particularly pertaining to school closures, I really began to pay close attention to. Local politics to [00:01:00] our school board who is sitting on the school board who is making these decisions.

And I very quickly realized these people are not really representing, uh, the populace. They're representing special interest groups like the teacher unions. And I thought, well, you know what, I'll throw my head in the ring and I'll run for school board. I'm a mom, I have three children. Uh. Pay pretty high property taxes here in Illinois.

I'll give it a shot. And wow, that was a huge awakening for me to see just how deep the funding to special interests goes and how they do not really want, um, independent critical thinkers on these school boards. So when I started saying, you know, now DEI is a very common acronym, right? Everybody knows diversity, equity, and inclusion.

But I was seeing these applications in school looking behind the curtain during. Lockdowns during Zooms, seeing a lot of this identity politics stuff coming into classrooms. And as a school board candidate, I said, Hey, I don't really think this is a very good pedagogy, as they call it. And the teacher unions, all of these leftist interest groups started calling me a racist and a white [00:02:00] supremacist.

And I thought, oh, this is, this is really, really crazy, right? I'm just a mom and I just wanna see. Ethical governance in our local school district. And so two days after losing the school board race, I got close, got close to the union back slate. Uh, but two days after losing that race, I started awake Illinois as a nonprofit social welfare advocacy organization.

And we've just been taking these issues here in Illinois by storm. 

Brian Hyde: Just from what you've described, I'm sure you have a very, very full plate. Um, so let's talk about, uh, when it comes to prioritizing, what are some of the places where you find yourself spending more, more of your, your effort? 

Shannon Adcock: Well, you have to be strategic, right?

Because in the state of Illinois where we have a super Marxist majority, a lot of woke, a lot of issues negatively affecting our families, it's like whack-a-mole. That's what I call it. It's like, where do you start? And, and where do you end? So I think the big issue right now that people are, are recognizing is incredibly harmful is what's called a gender ideology, uh, or transgenderism or, uh.

Queer theory [00:03:00] as it applies to particularly K through 12 governance. So awake Illinois, my organization filed two federal civil rights complaints in the last two months. It's the busiest we have been since, I think our first year when we launched in 2021. And what this is looking to do is hold our schools accountable to ethical governance, for example, keeping males out of girls' bathrooms in.

For example, Bolingbrook High School in Valley View School District 365, which is where we have filed one of our federal civil rights complaints. Parents have had no idea that these policies have been in place. They may have heard it sort of almost like hyperbole, like concepts maybe in other parts of the country, but they've never known it to really be happening in their children's school district or in the state of Illinois.

And they're figuring this out very swiftly now. And so we had a father come to us back in November. Brian. And he told us that a boy was being permitted into his daughter's bathroom. So she was using the bathroom, saw somebody outside her stall through the, you know, little. Break there in the door [00:04:00] and when she emerged, she saw a male standing there in male clothing.

By the way, that's a pretty important detail. We haven't spoken too too much about the details of that particular interaction, but she told her father and she was very uncomfortable. She felt vulnerable and unsafe. And so since November we've had to watch, you know, first President Trump get elected and see the 2020 Title IX protections of students reinstated.

You know, the, the Biden rule that said anything goes basically in boys can be in girls sports and in girls spaces. That's been vacated by the US district, and so this is very important. We had to line up all of these things to have all of the right. Policies in place where we could file a federal civil right complaint.

And I don't know if you're familiar with this or, or your audience, but a task force has been created through the Department of Education and the Department of Justice, so US Secretary McMahon and the Department of Education, and then Pam Bondy, uh, US Attorney General. They have a task force [00:05:00] right now that is focused solely on these Title IX complaints, and they're getting flooded with them.

And sources close to the administration tell us that awake, Illinois's federal complaint has been prioritized. Um, there's also a federal civil rights complaint pending against Chicago Public Schools for their policies, allowing all of this that's in violation of Title ix, boys and Girls Spaces, uh, sports teams.

And it's just, it's just gone bonkers. And I don't know if you saw recently, Chicago Teacher Union in their contract put in a clause that says male teachers can have access to female student spaces, bathrooms, if they want to. That's. Part of their contract right now. So this is not hyperbole, it's happening statewide.

It's a systemic issue. And awake, Illinois has been on the front lines of calling attention to this and appealing now to the federal government because Illinois is broke. You know, it's good news, bad news, Illinois is broke, but they rely heavily on federal funding. And so this is a pretty easy way to hold them accountable.

Brian Hyde: Shannon, how are parents responding in terms of, um, those who say, look, I, I don't [00:06:00] even wanna subject my kids to, um, you know, the gender ideology that seems, you know, prevalent in public schools. Um, is this driving more people to the homeschooling movement? Uh, in fact, for that matter, I is homeschooling, likewise, experiencing pressure from, from some of these, uh, same groups that promoting these, um, you know, gender ideologies.

Shannon Adcock: Absolutely. I'm glad you mentioned that. So homeschooling has been on the rise. It's the fastest growing education sector, if you will, across the country, particularly over the last five years as more parents did see, you know, the abhorrent governance in the local school boards, the special interests involved in that.

Um, and then the radical sex education that. Was passed, at least in Illinois in 2021 that says K through 12. If you teach comprehensive sexual education, you have to incorporate concepts of gender, ideology, and transgenderism, and being born into the wrong body and a million different genders as young as kindergarten, right?

So parents have figured this out. They're devastated by it because people want to see their local school [00:07:00] districts do well. They already pay a ton of taxes into them. They want them to do well, but they've been pushed against a wall, right? Regular people are not able to get elected to their school board.

They don't have representative government, and so they have chosen private school, or they have chosen a parochial school and or homeschool. Homeschools huge in the state of Illinois, particularly because since the fifties it has been a very, very free sector. You haven't had to register or file paperwork until.

And many people in Illinois are now familiar with this until, uh. We have a really radical legislator here in the state of Illinois who has filed House Bill 2 8, 2 7 rep. Tara Costa Howard filed this. She's a special interest, uh, legislator, teacher unions, you know, all the woke special interests have funded her campaigns.

And 2 8 2 7 is called the Homeschool Act. Uh, wake Illinois calls it the homeschool attack bill because. When it was initially drawn, it was going to criminalize parents who do not register with the state or with their local school district and basically consider those children [00:08:00] truant, which would then mean that government could knock on their door and investigate them.

I mean, this was a really, really radically drawn bill. Really radical, special interest. Put this bill together with these legislators and so. Unfortunately, yet again, as parents harness education, freedom and usurp their parental rights, which I would assert our God-given Pritzker doesn't give those to us.

No government gives them to us. They're trying to attack that, you know, the foundation of Liberty. You can educate your children in your home, and this bill is. Is getting incredible pushback. I mean, the statewide grassroots lobby against this has been fantastic. It has been probably one of the best grassroots lobby ever, uh, efforts in the state of Illinois to, to show people what exactly is happening in this bill, the interest behind it.

And why it needs to be fought. But more importantly, why going into 2026 midterms, people need to unseat these radical legislators who no longer represent them and get back to basics, get back to liberty, get back to parental rights. They think that's gonna be a huge issue going into [00:09:00] 2026. 

Brian Hyde: Man, I mean, you are, uh.

You are hitting on all the right, uh, the right issues here. I'm curious about the kind of, uh, pushback that, that you get. You mentioned, you know, for instance, the teachers unions and so forth. What about, uh, lawmakers themselves? It, it seems like sometimes, uh, issues like this create some very strange bedfellows.

Um, are they beholden to, for instance, unions and, and the like, and, and is that why they'll run interference for them instead of, you know, standing up for parental rights? 

Shannon Adcock: Sure. Well politics these days, especially in Illinois, it's very expensive. So the minute a politician, Republican or Democrat takes donor money, uh, you have to look at how that may motivate them when it comes time for a legislative session or for bills or you know, for whatever cause they champion.

And unfortunately with a super Marxist. Woke majority we're not a Democrat majority in the state of Illinois. My grandparents were Democrats. They'd be disgusted by what has happened with the Democrat Party of Illinois, which is anti-family, anti-child antilier. So we have Marxists running [00:10:00] the show and it's pretty.

Pretty common knowledge that the teacher unions have incredible money that they put into politics along with Governor Pritzker. He has, you know, incredible money. He's one of the wealthiest people in the country, so he's been able to fund these legislative campaigns, tend to one in some cases, particularly in the suburbs, where you're going to have to have a pretty good amount of money in the coffers to run.

And so a lot of people. Who could be, you know, maybe even just moderates or centrist, they don't even put their name on the ballot. They don't even try. 'cause they're like, why bother? I don't have that kind of money. I don't have that kind of backing. And so fortunately as the Democrat party is becoming increasingly far left and radical, um, their base even is starting to question their loyalty to the Democrat party.

And we welcome that. Um, and so I think that you're gonna see a little bit more. Interest in people running who are moderates and centrist and not super far left radicals and are just saying, Hey, we need to get back to basics and stop with this whole culture war. It's, it's really crushing our state 

Brian Hyde: for people who [00:11:00] see, um, the magnitude of the challenge in front of you and feel like, oh, I don't know.

It's just, I don't know if it's worth it. Um, let's talk to them for just a moment and, and why is it important that, uh, they don't outsource, um, standing up for what they believe in to, to someone else? 

Shannon Adcock: Good question. Well, we need good people to run. That's the the big deal. We need people with conviction who are not going to be fence riders.

And unfortunately, the people who aren't far left radicals tend to be, um, I don't wanna use the word weak, but they tend to be almost too nice. Dare I say that, um, they don't wanna ruffle any feathers and they just, they just think that they can work with these Marxists. They think they can find unity with Marxists.

You cannot find unity with people who will strip you of your parental rights and who want to sexualize your children and, uh, basically replace you, the mom and the dad in your home. So stop talking about unity. This is not 1982. You know, when Reagan's not president anymore, um, the far left faction of the Democrat party, [00:12:00] you're going to have to have a strong backbone to go up against them.

And so when people say they want to run, I can tell almost within 10 minutes of speaking with them, Brian, if they're gonna even stand a chance. Because if they start saying to me, well, you know, Shannon, we gotta, we gotta work with these people. I'm immediately like. Okay, you go right ahead and work with the Marxists.

I'm sure they're going to have so much respect for you because you don't toe the woke line and you're a pretty decent person with a, you know, conviction. Um, you're gonna have to be bold, a bold warrior for truth and for ethical governance and speak pretty clearly to that. And I have to tell you, you better know Marxism.

You better know the origins of it and better be. Better be able to speak to it very clearly because that is what is happening. And if you don't have the verbiage, you're never going to be able to say how you will counter that in a state legislative session or how you will represent your constituents instead of, you know, radical ideology in either direction.

And so I think people have to almost go take like a communications class or a media course before they can run for office because the left is very good at messaging and they're very [00:13:00] good at advertising. Um, anybody who counters that narrative is going to have to be even better at that game. 

Brian Hyde: And have some thick skin.

You pay a price if, if you're willing to speak up for what you believe in. 

Shannon Adcock: Thick skin and it is a family journey. You know, even though I'm not an elected politician, being a public advocate on these issues, they target me as if I am. They targeted. My husband, they spammed his email, you know, his company email list.

And do you know what, you know John's wife Shannon does. And fortunately his company was like, uh, yeah, she's a mom who speaks for kids. You know, it is not a woke company. Um, so that's cool. But yeah, some people have had to retreat from the barricade because it's. Been too, too much of a liability for their income or for their family dynamic, and I respect that.

But it's going to take thick skin. And at first, when I, when I was called a racist white supremacist, I mean, I cried, I openly cried and it was very difficult. But that's almost like, you know, small potatoes now because now they're liking, they're liking me to Julius Stryker at a school board meeting, uh, who is an executed war criminal.

And [00:14:00] so they will up the ante. But I think that's just reflective that they cannot debate you on these issues. You're winning the issues they have to go for personal attacks 'cause that's really all they have. They have to name call because if you actually get down to the policy, common sense wins.

Ethical governance wins, liberty wins, parents and your parental rights that are God given, that wins. Um, so keep focusing on the policy and don't let those personal attacks get to you. That's usually my, my biggest advice to people, which sounds easy, but when you try and apply it, it can be difficult. 

Brian Hyde: So Shannon, let's talk about how to connect people up with, uh, awake Illinois.

What's, what's the best way to do that? I. 

Shannon Adcock: Uh, awake il.com is our website. We're very active on Twitter, formerly known as X. Our handle is at awake il. Uh, we're across all the social media platforms. I encourage people to go and watch our live streams, to look at our blog, to subscribe to our free newsletter, and just stay current because as we whistle blow on these issues and as we.

Tackle, you know, grassroots, lobbying against bills. We really want you to be [00:15:00] involved and to be invested in what's happening. You can't just have me at Wake Illinois do all this for you. You are going to have to save your own family and your own liberty. Uh, and I think that through the grassroots groundswell of, you know, look at national organizations, moms for Liberty, parents to education, uh, this is a national cultural movement.

And so I encourage people to get a. You know, to be part of that and awake Illinois, certainly on deck to help you do that. 

Brian Hyde: Again, we are talking with, uh, Shannon Adcox. She is the founder of Awake Illinois. Um, Shannon, thank you so much for being our guest on the Prairie State Wire Podcast. 

Shannon Adcock: My pleasure.

Thank you, Brian.