All of Chicago’s board of education members announced their resignations on Friday amid tense disagreements between Mayor Brandon Johnson and the chief executive of Chicago Public Schools over the school district’s budget next year.
The move by the seven board members, including Jianan Shi, the board president, comes in the midst of contract negotiations between the school district and the Chicago Teachers Union.
Mr. Johnson, who is aligned with the union, and Pedro Martinez, the chief executive of Chicago’s school district, have clashed over the mayor’s plan to fill a $1 billion gap in the district’s budget.
As part of his plan, Mr. Johnson had proposed a $300 million high-interest loan to cover a $175 million pension for staff members in the district who aren’t teachers, and to cover pay increases for members of the union, among other things.
Mr. Martinez had vehemently opposed the plan, initially with the support of the education board, and did not factor it into the school system’s nearly $10 billion budget for 2025. In response, Mr. Johnson asked Mr. Martinez to resign in late September, according to The Chicago Sun-Times and the local station WBEZ.
The mayor’s supporters have also called on Mr. Martinez to step down, saying his failure to lobby the state for more funding has made him an ineffective leader for Chicago Public Schools, the nation’s fourth-largest public school district with over 325,000 students.
But Mr. Martinez’s supporters have argued that the mayor’s budget plan is not financially responsible, given the high interest rate. They have also said that both the proposal and the push for Mr. Martinez to resign reflect an attempt by the mayor and the teachers’ union to consolidate power.
In a joint statement on Friday, spokesmen for the board of education and Mr. Johnson’s office said the mass resignation was part of a “necessary” effort to “serve the best interests of students and families in Chicago Public Schools.”
The school district, in its own statement, thanked the board members for their service, saying they had “advocated for equity” and fought to better serve students with disabilities and those in “under-resourced” neighborhoods.
Neither Mayor Johnson nor Mr. Martinez were immediately available to comment further on Friday. Mr. Shi, the board president, did not respond to a request for comment on the members’ decision to resign.
The mass resignation paves the way for Mr. Johnson to install a new board, one that could force Mr. Martinez to step down and put in place the mayor’s budget plan.
But starting in January, the board will shift to what officials called a hybrid makeup for the next two years, meaning half of the members will be elected and the other half, including the board president, will be appointed by the mayor. In 2027, when Mr. Johnson’s term is set to end, the school board will return to fully elected members.
The mayor is expected to announce the new board members on Monday. None of the current members, who were all appointed by Mr. Johnson, will serve on the next board in either an elected or appointed capacity, according to the statement from the mayor and the board. The next school board meeting is scheduled for Oct. 24.
Chicago’s school board is not the only one with some sort of control by the mayor. As education reform efforts gained popularity in the early 2000s, so, too, did efforts by big-city mayors to have more say in school boards.
But several cities, including Detroit and Oakland, Calif., have since phased out such models after they yielded mixed outcomes on graduation rates and college readiness. Today, fewer than a dozen midsize and large school districts remain under some form of mayoral control, including ones in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington.
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