The Chicago Board of Education postponed a controversial budget amendment pushed by Mayor Brandon Johnson Thursday, prolonging doubt about who will pay for a new teachers contract and a $175 million pension payment to the city.
That means for now the latter’s cost remains on the city side, which has until the end of this month to resolve that budget gap or else end the 2024 fiscal year with a deficit.
Just minutes before its monthly meeting, the school board called off the votes that would pave the way for Chicago Public Schools to issue or repurpose $242 million in debt and ink an agreement making the district responsible for its pension obligation. School board President Sean Harden cited contract negotiations as the reason for the delay.
“We’re extremely, extremely close to settling the teachers union contract,” said Harden at the start of Thursday’s board meeting.
“So as a result, the budget amendment … has been withdrawn from today’s agenda, and these items will be brought back to the board at a later date for consideration.”
Harden did not specify when the budget amendment would go up for a vote.
According to several sources close to contract negotiations, Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates led a strong push for a new four-year contract to be settled Thursday before the board meeting where members were supposed to vote on the amendment. The amendment needed 14 votes from board members to pass.
Shortly after the item was pulled, the mayor released a statement saying the delay was due to “meaningful progress” toward a contract and Thursday’s announcement that President Donald Trump will abolish the U.S. Department of Education.
“Following yesterday’s meeting, we are pleased that Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union are making meaningful progress towards a contract agreement. As a result, Board President Harden decided to postpone the budget amendment vote until the contract is settled,” Johnson wrote.
He added: “Furthermore, given that President Trump plans to sign an executive order as early as today that would dismantle the Department
of Education, we want to ensure that our school district and our teachers are fully aligned and that we are doing everything we can to protect our students and protect our schools from harmful policies and potential budget cuts.”
The ongoing battle over finances and borrowing in the nation’s fourth-largest school district has put immense pressure on the board in recent weeks. The canceled vote is the latest twist in the dramatic, long-running power struggle between Mayor Brandon Johnson and his lame-duck CPS CEO Pedro Martinez, who has resisted the mayor’s pressure to amend the district’s finances despite losing his job in the process.
Unless the board can vote on an amendment soon, Johnson is back to square one in figuring out how to fund the upcoming CTU contract — while racing to patch up a $175 million hole in the budget.
The Johnson administration has argued the pension for non-teacher CPS personnel, known as the Municipal Employees’ Annuity and Benefit Fund, should be picked up by the district as it transitions to a fully elected school board in the next two years. The MEABF covers employees of both CPS and the city of Chicago. The mayor has insisted the district cover the payment because over 60% of MEABF current participants are CPS employees.
The $242 million borrowing plan, Johnson’s top budgeteers have contended, is a necessary stopgap to cover that payment plus upcoming CTU and principals union contract costs, and could be offset by future property tax and tax-increment financing revenue.
But Martinez’s team has staunchly rejected that argument, saying CPS cannot plug in a budget gap by borrowing more debt or refinancing existing debt and that the added costs from the pension payment could result in midyear budget cuts.
A $35,000 outside financial report commissioned by school board President Sean Harden to come up with additional solutions pointed out that refinancing would necessitate a stamp of approval from legal analysts and would be a lengthy process.
The standoff has cast open divisions across City Council and beyond, with multiple rounds of aldermanic letters urging a resolution and a last-minute City Hall meeting with the mayor, Martinez, Harden and Davis Gates on Wednesday.
After the huddle, Johnson and Harden told reporters that the conversation was productive and focused on settling the remaining provisions of the CTU contract, which the mayor insisted could be resolved with or without Thursday’s budget amendment.
“Quite frankly,” a sanguine Johnson told reporters Wednesday regarding the CTU contract, “I believe they should get it done tonight.”
That did not come to pass.
The fact that Johnson, Chicago’s first mayor from CTU ranks, is struggling this mightily with the waning years of mayoral control over the school district was a remarkable development after he campaigned on a bold education agenda that promised labor peace and generous investments in public schools.
Thursday morning, the mayor demurred when asked about the status of a CTU deal: “Who’s asking that? No one’s even talking about that.”
“Let me just say as a former public school teacher, I know exactly what our teachers need and what they’re going through,” the mayor said at an unrelated event. “There’s not a big space between where we started in this contract negotiations and where we’re ultimately needing to land.”
The teachers union has been without a contract since last June, a widening headache for Johnson as he’s found himself in the unusual predicament of feuding with his schools chief while attempting to muscle his agenda through a divided hybrid Board of Education.
Davis Gates herself alluded to that obstacle, telling reporters on Wednesday that her closing message to school board members who might be holdouts was: “They have a runaway CEO. They do.”
For his part, the CPS CEO responded to the mayor’s call for a contract to be settled Wednesday night: “I wanted that a month ago, so join the club,” Martinez said.
The contentious board vote followed months of extraordinary tension and conflict at CPS that has roiled the school district as well as city politics. In the past year, Johnson’s handpicked school board resigned after resisting pressure to fire Martinez and take out a costly loan to fund district operations.
CTU has also had a falling out with SEIU 73, an erstwhile ally that has accused the teachers union of raiding its membership with a proposal that SEIU said would shift workers from its own to CTU.
SEIU issued a statement accusing the teachers of attacking their union and threatened to file a lawsuit against CPS if it accedes to the union’s demands. The unions broke further last week when SEIU 73 vice president Stacia Scott came out against the budget amendment at a recent board meeting, saying the “amendment begs more questions than we have answers for.”
“If it means forgoing teachers’ raises and principals’ contract implementation, then we don’t think this board should take it on. If it means mass cuts, furlough days and balancing the budget on low-wage, working-class support staff in CPS, then we don’t think this district should take it on,” Scott said.
At an event hosted by Illinois House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch last Friday, Davis Gates approached SEIU Illinois State Council executive director Anthony Driver and extended her hand for a shake. Driver reached out to shake her hand but Davis Gates pulled it back and said, “Ya’ll ain’t s—- and you ain’t s—-,” the Tribune was told.
Driver confirmed the incident to the Tribune but declined further comment on the exchange. Asked about the exchange, Davis Gates declined to immediately comment.
Now, the immediate crisis on the mayor’s desk is avoiding an outcome of the city ending the 2024 fiscal year in the red. Last month, his Chief Financial Officer Jill Jaworski suggested a backup plan of dipping into city reserves should the school board reject the administration’s plan to pick up the MEABF, but Johnson would not go that far this week and instead told reporters he would remain “optimistic.”
Closing out last year with a $175 million hole would be an unprecedented outcome, but biting off that much from the city’s reserves also risks a credit downgrade that could worsen borrowing terms in the near future and be politically fraught for the freshman mayor. One ratings agency in January already knocked the city down a notch over Johnson’s 2025 budget plan.
Johnson and the CTU led the charge for an elected school board bill, which was approved by Springfield in 2021 under his predecessor and political nemesis of the teachers union, Lori Lightfoot. But the union had poor showings in the first-ever school board races this November, winning four out of 10 seats.
The saga also resulted in the mayoral-appointed school board firing Martinez in December, but without cause, leading to a contentious dynamic in which he’s allowed to remain on the job until June — and actively impede Johnson’s plans for the school district.
The CEO was granted a temporary restraining order against Johnson’s school board appointees, who attended contract negotiations several days after his firing. Martinez’s attorney argued that by showing up at negotiations without the CEO’s permission, they impeded his job duties. At the time, sources said Johnson had floated the idea of having a co-CEO, and President Harden’s name came up as someone who might fill that seat.
After Wednesday’s impromptu meeting, Harden deflected when reporters asked him if he would be interested in being the next CPS CEO.
“Not at all. There’s no truth to that at all. My hands are full operating from the lens that I operate from, and I’m fine with that,” he said.
A resolution to be voted on Thursday, introduced by board member Che “Rhymefest” Smith and co-sponsored by board members Anusha Thotakura and Ebony Deberry, states that both the next CEO and the interim CEO must have a “valid Illinois Professional Educator License, with a Superintendent endorsement.” The title of superintendent changed under former Mayor Richard M. Daley in the mid-’90s.
The change was part of the state legislature’s Chicago School Reform Amendatory Act, which gave the mayor power to appoint school board members directly. For CEO, Daley appointed Paul Vallas, the city’s budget director at the time.
The terms “CEO” and “superintendent” are functionally equivalent, but changing the fine print in state law specifies the requirements from general management experience to a master’s degree, two years of administrative experience and a superintendent endorsement.
“If a pilot has to have a pilot’s license, or a doctor has to have a medical license, why wouldn’t the head of schools have to have a licensure in the core work that schools do?” Rhymefest said in an interview with the Tribune.
The post Chicago Board of Education postpones vote on controversial budget amendment first appeared on Voxtrend News.
