Hybrid Board Takes Office

Later this morning, the Chicago Board of Education’s 10 elected members and four new appointees will be seated alongside the remaining six interim board members appointed in October. The board members I spoke with don't know whether the mystery 21st member will appear and be sworn in at today’s agenda review meeting. 

If so, there’s plenty of room for the final member to join the group, thanks to a $4 million boardroom renovation. The Chicago Sun-Times shared photos of the new space yesterday. The renovation doubles the number of seats for observers, to 200, and they will now be able to see presentations along a side wall equipped with seven large monitors. 

Talk That Talk

Now that the board is official, how board members communicate with each other and the public may become more complicated. The Open Meetings Act precludes more than five board members from gathering outside of a formal meeting to discuss board business. 

This led to a challenge during official board training last week. The 10 elected board members and the newly announced appointees who had yet to be seated attended the entire training because they hadn’t been seated yet. But according to the Open Meetings Act, to keep the training private, only two of the six interim board members could be present at the same time. 

The solution, I’m told, was to have board president Sean Harden attend the entire training, and schedule each of the other five interim members to attend one day of training with the group. It’s unclear how those five board members are receiving the remainder of the training.

How board members will communicate with the press and the public has also become contentious. The district requested that all board communication with media go through Harden, but elected members are refusing to go along with that, arguing that as elected officials, they need to build relationships with the media and communicate directly with the people in their districts. “I’m going to talk to the media when I need to talk to the media,” declared Angel Gutierrez (8a). 

Board member Carlos Rivas (3b)  has already scheduled his first official school visit on Thursday, to Lowell Elementary in Humboldt Park, where he was a student and his mother was a cafeteria worker. Music teacher Carmen Rivera-Kurban has been there since he was a student in the 1990s. Later Rivas worked at Lowell as a security guard and a long-term substitute teacher before joining Teach for America. 

Today's Public Agenda

Though the public agenda mostly involves routine matters like authorizing contracts and approving new members to fill Local School Council vacancies, there are a few items to watch closely.

Vice President Vote: After the board takes the oath of office, they’ll vote on a new vice president. I’m told appointed member Olga Bautista (10b)  and elected member Jessica Biggs (6b) are vying for the position. This could be a first opportunity to see if a vote falls along elected vs. appointed lines or if alliances have already become more complicated.

Speakers During Public Participation: We can expect someone from Chicago Teachers Union leadership–likely Vice President Jackson Potter–to make remarks welcoming the board and giving the union’s view of the contentious contract negotiations, which may be getting close to a deal despite differing views of the district’s financial circumstances. In addition to the non-financial obstacles to a deal, pay for veteran teachers has become an issue. This wrinkle also happened in 2016, when teachers with more than 14 years of experience were threatened with a temporary salary hit in the middle of the proposed contract’s four-year term. They found a solution then without a strike. 

Possibly the biggest financial headache now is whether Chicago Public Schools or the city will pay for the $175 million pension payment for non-teaching employees. The district and the union want the city to pay for it, but the city did not include the payment in its last-minute budget that squeaked through in December.

Agenda Items for Consideration: Perhaps the most interesting one is a resolution supporting the district’s application for a federal grant through the Magnet Schools Assistance Program. Will our new president kill this grant? 

Board Minutes: The motions here include keeping the closed session minutes from December 12 confidential, which is routine, but that meeting’s closed session may not have been routine. CPS parent Miriam Bhimani requested that the Illinois Attorney General’s Public Access Counselor review the closed session from December 12 to ensure the discussion did not violate the Open Meetings Act. During the public portion of that meeting, board member Michilla Blaise (5b) suggested that the board discuss its plans for the Acero Charter Schools facing closure during closed session. If that happened, it would violate the Open Meetings Act, which strictly limits the topics that can be discussed in closed session. In a thread on the social media platform Bluesky, Bhimani shared the response CPS sent to the Attorney General’s office denying them access to a recording of the closed session.

What’s Happening in Closed Session? As usual, the real action will be happening in closed session. Today’s closed session appears to address three topics: the contract negotiations,  CEO Pedro Martinez’s employment, and the closely related issue of his lawsuit against the interim board. The lawsuit alleges Martinez was improperly fired because the interim board had not been trained and lacked qualifications comparable to those of the previous board.

What’s Missing from the Agenda? 

The big missing piece appears to be attention to progress on goals related to student outcomes. In September, when the district’s new five-year plan was unveiled, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s first appointed board promised to set aside time at every board meeting to review district progress toward the plan’s goals. But that only happened at one meeting before that board resigned en masse in October. Since then, the board has yet to take up monitoring progress on the five-year plan.

Let’s hope that with the full (or nearly-full) board installed and some hope of a contract agreement in sight, board members will soon have some bandwidth to shift their focus away from all the adult drama, toward ensuring young people are getting what they need.

Trading Card Update: the full deck of Board Rule trading cards is still in progress. CPS grads Ava Galban and Alvaro Guzman are hard at work on the drawings and design. I am paying them for their labor, but if you’d like to chip in to support their artistry, I’ve enabled the tip jar.