CHICAGO (CN) — All seven members of the Chicago Board of Education announced their resignation in a joint statement with Mayor Brandon Johnson on Friday, saying they would “transition” off the board later this month.
“Mayor Brandon Johnson and members of the Chicago Board of Education are enacting a transition plan which includes all current members transitioning from service on the board later this month,” Johnson’s office and the board said in the statement.
The board’s resignation comes a mere month before Chicagoans will vote for the city’s first-ever elected school board members. The board is tripling in size come January, and ten elected officials will take their seat on the board alongside 11 members appointed by the mayor. None of the current board members — whom Johnson appointed himself in July 2023 —are seeking election, according to the joint statement with the mayor.
The announcement follows months of skullduggery between the Chicago Teachers Union, Johnson’s administration and Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez — a holdover from the administration of former mayor Lori Lightfoot, who clashed with the teachers union on multiple occasions.
Johnson and Martinez’s disputes caught public attention this summer, with the city’s public school system facing a $500 million budget shortfall going into the 2024-25 school year. The school board unanimously passed a $9.9 billion budget this July which covered the deficit by cutting administration expenses, letting office staff go and restructuring existing debt. It also left hundreds of unfilled positions with the school district vacant, and did not account for increased expenses that might result from renegotiation of the teachers union’s now-expired 2019-2024 collective bargaining agreement.
Martinez touted in an open letter to Chicago Public Schools families that the budget did not cut schools’ funding, adding that it was decided on with a commitment to “making all decisions with equity at the core.” Johnson and the teachers union, who are closely aligned on their vision for education in Chicago, sharply criticized it regardless.
The union called it a “make-believe budget” in a statement the same day the board passed it — a budget they said would leave schools understaffed and played “hot potato” with teacher pensions. The union also noted the school district laid off hundreds of school staff in June.
Johnson had proposed that the school district should take out a short-term loan to cover the budget gap while the union’s new collective bargaining agreement was finalized. In a rebuke to the mayor, both Martinez and much of the board rejected the proposal. Tensions deepened through late September, with the Chicago Sun-Times reporting on Sept. 20 that Johnson wanted Martinez to step down.
Martinez publicly announced his refusal to resign in an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune on Sept. 24, though Johnson denied asking “anybody to do anything” to press earlier this week.
The school board has the final say on firing the district CEO, which makes Friday’s mass resignation a potential win for Johnson and the teachers union.
A new board handpicked by the mayor could make it easier for Johnson to push Martinez out — though the terms of Martinez’ contract don’t make his ouster a forgone conclusion — and call for a renewed vote on the proposed loan to cover the school budget shortfall.
The teachers union characterizes the development as instability which Martinez himself created. In an official statement, the union blamed the district CEO for obstructing its ongoing contract negotiations as well as a more progressive vision for Chicago schools.
“If the CEO put the board in the impossible position of facing potential lawsuits, accepting his cuts, or waiting on a revenue plan he refused to deliver, then it’s up to the rest of the city to break through his obstruction,” the union said Friday.
But opponents of the mayor and the teachers union are also seizing on the moment to criticize Johnson for not building consensus with his own appointed school board.
“I am deeply concerned, as I imagine many of you are as well, about today’s news regarding the resignation of the entire Board of Education,” Alderman Andre Vasquez, usually seen as a progressive in city hall, said in public statement. “If this resignation is, as it appears to be, related to Mayor Johnson’s desire for CPS to take out a short-term, high-interest loan to pay off a pension debt rather than including it in the city’s own budget, it is even more concerning.”
“This is stunning. 4th largest school district in the US and the full board gets forced out because they refused to oust a fiscally responsible CEO during contract negotiations,” Alderman Bill Conway, a city hall conservative, also said on social media Friday afternoon.
Per government data from the National Center for Education Statistics, Chicago is the third-largest, not fourth-largest school district in the country by student enrollment levels.
The dispute has became so scrutinized that Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker briefly weighed in last week urging calm.
“As he’s stated previously, Governor Pritzker’s focus is first and foremost what’s good for Illinois students,” a spokesperson for the governor said to Courthouse News Friday afternoon. “The administration will continue to work with our partners in the Illinois General Assembly to invest in public education across the state.”