Moody’s Investors Service dropped the credit rating for the Chicago Board of Education deeper into the junk level on Monday, citing the school district’s liquidity and budget woes.

The downgrade to B3 with a negative outlook from B2 is due to the district’s “increasingly precarious liquidity position and acute need for cash flow borrowing to support ongoing operations,” Moody’s said in a statement.

The nation’s third-largest public school system has $6.8 billion of general obligation bonds outstanding. The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) is struggling with escalating pension payments that will jump to about $720 million this fiscal year from $676 million in fiscal 2016, as well as drained reserves and debt dependency.

A Chicago Police officer has agreed to give up his gun and state firearm owner’s ID card while facing federal charges alleging he violated two teenagers’ civil rights.

Marco Proano, 41, shot the teens on Dec. 22, 2013. He fired 16 shots at the stolen car they were riding in, authorities say. The shooting was captured on a police vehicle’s dashboard camera.

About 300 public schools in Chicago will lose a total of $45 million in funding because enrollment this fall fell below projections, adding to the pain of budget cuts already imposed by the cash-strapped district.

The district said 378,481 students were enrolled on the 10^th day of classes this year. That’s almost 14,000 less than last year and continues a trend of enrollment falling below 400,000, which occurred two years ago for the first time in at least two decades.

CPS estimated the latest budget adjustments would lead to about 300 layoffs, with teachers and support staff among those losing jobs. Budget cuts in some cases would leave schools without enough money to provide basic education. CPS said 55 schools will split $5.7 million if enrollment declines were “significantly deeper than expected” or “would prevent them from offering critical academic programming.”

A Belleville man who admitted to robbing a Domino’s pizza restaurant in Belleville in July 2015 was sentenced to more than 10 years in federal prison on Monday.

Sterling D. Gould, 38, was sentenced to 130 months in prison and five years of supervised release by U.S. Judge Nancy J. Rosenstengel during a hearing in U.S. District Court. Gould was ordered to pay $368 in restitution and a $300 special assessment. He was given credit for jail time served since his July 14, 2015 arrest.

Gould was arrested after Belleville police investigated an armed robbery of the Domino’s, 4000 W. Main St. Police were called to the restaurant at 8:50 p.m. on July 12, 2015. Store employees told police three men wearing white-colored cloth face coverings and purple/blue-colored gloves entered the store. One of the men was carrying a silver large-framed revolver.

Police said the employees were ordered to the ground by the men and were told to open the cash registers and store safe. Police said the safe was on a nine-minute delay to open, so the manager was told to stand in the drive-through window while the other employees were ordered to wait in a cooler. The safe was entered and money was removed before the men fled the restaurant through the back door, police said.

Worst-case scenario, Chicago’s public school teachers walk off the job on Oct. 11 — the day after Columbus Day.

But a teachers’ strike is far from a done deal.

Most members of the Chicago Teachers Union — 90.6 percent to be exact — participated in a strike poll last week, and the overwhelming majority of them — 95.6 percent gave the CTU their OK to strike by signing a petition their colleagues could see.

Some Chicago-area school districts are quietly giving tens of thousands of dollars in bonuses to teachers and administrators who are already retired — payouts that come on top of multiple salary spikes given to educators as they head out the door.

From Deerfield to Arlington Heights to Berwyn, school districts are providing the post-retirement payouts at taxpayer expense, sort of a public version of golden parachutes that highly paid private sector employees might receive. The little-noticed bonuses are tucked into teacher and administrator contracts, and school officials acknowledge that payouts to individual educators are not always transparent or publicized.

What’s clear from a review of several labor contracts is that the bonuses are calculated in different ways, such as a flat amount; a set figure multiplied by an educator’s years of service; or a percentage of an educator’s annual salary — which can be lucrative in affluent districts that pay six-figure salaries to administrators and teachers alike.