Just a week after Gov. George Ryan called the Illinois Legislature into a special session, the state is still reeling from budget cuts to be made around the state.

The estimated cuts at this time total about $450 million, which includes cuts from elementary and secondary education, prisons, universities, and human services.

The higher education budget, which includes money for universities, was cut by $111 million. Of the $111 million, $35 million of the cut was taken from the Monetary Award Program that provides grants for fifth-year students. The cut will not affect federal Pell grants. The Monetary Award Program will still be used to fund more than 100,000 students a year.

In all, $49.6 million was cut from state universities, $38.3 million from scholarships, and $14.8 million from community colleges.

Eastern will suffer an $1.8 million cut while Southern Illinois will be seeing an $8.2 million cut.

While no final budgets were finalized during the last Board of Trustees meeting, Eastern’s interim President Lou Hencken says that “It looks like we finally have the budget. I say looks like because we don’t have it in hand yet, but it certainly looks like we have a very good idea of what its going to be like.”

The only thing that is unsure of at the time is the income fund. The income fund is made up of money that the university receives from tuition. Hencken will have a better look at the income fund when the number of freshman and other new students and existing students is more clear.

An area that has been a concern within the last week has been salaries at Eastern. The state’s latest version of the budget does not include any money for salary raises.

While other universities are considering layoffs, Hencken is positive that Eastern will start the new fall semester without any layoffs.

“Other schools are maybe going to have layoffs, but that does not affect here. It looks like that things that we’ve laid out in the past as far as the budget cutting in the past, we’ll have to continue those measures.”

“We’re going to get through this, we really are. The budgets come in good times and they come in bad times, unfortunately I’m here for the bad times. “

Residents of Illinois may still be skeptical about the cuts being made, but Illinois is not the only state to have had to undergo major cuts since last summer. Besides Illinois, 42 other states have been put in the same situation as Illinois.

In a fax sent to the Daily Eastern News from Director of Communications office for the governor, Ryan wrote that none of the spending cuts were easy to make and that the cuts affect people and families in every part of the state.

The state has risen taxes on cigarettes and riverboat gambling profits, but the revenues from those taxes are not enough to block out the need for millions of dollars from spending cuts.

Although the $450 million cuts are being made, Ryan wants Illinois citizens to focus on the fact that more than $22.3 billion will be spent on different programs and services across the state.