With Thousands Marching in the Streets, Chicago Teachers Union Declares ‘This Means War!’
Teachers, Students and Community Members demonstrate in front of the Chicago Board of Trade (Martin de Bourmont)
Cries of “this means war!” echoed throughout Chicago’s financial district this Tuesday as teachers demonstrated against the Board of Education ahead of union contract negotiations this summer.
They made for a formidable sight: led by a troupe of black-clad high school percussionists and holding their fists up high, members of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and their supporters marched on Chicago’s LaSalle Street yesterday demanding adequate wages, benefits and resources for their students, insisting that the district’s financial woes are actually a case of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) being “broke on purpose.”
The rally, which began in front of Chicago’s James R. Thompson center, served as an unofficial kickoff for the CTU’s campaign to bargain a new contract with CPS’s Board of Education, which represents 400,000 students and the country’s third-largest school district. The current contract expires on June 30.
CPS currently faces a $1.1 billion budget gap for the fiscal year beginning on July 1, leaving doubt as to whether or not it will be able to pay the $634 million due to the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund on June 30. Further hampering negotiations between the CTU and CPS is the district’s contention that Chicago teachers will need to accept a 7% pay cut along with increases in health insurance premiums.
Rather than enacting budget cuts, the CTU is demanding that the city’s wealthiest corporations pay more in taxes in order to fund smaller class sizes, less standardized testing, funding for school libraries and art classes, and increased staffing of all schools with counselors and clinicians. Teachers also demanded the protection of teachers’ pensions and salaries.
Many of the demonstrators carried signs that matched the evening’s rhetoric in militancy and succinct condemnation of the Chicago city government. “Payout? No thanks!” read a popular sign. “Take the money from the banks!” “The 1% owes us,” read another. Others reminded onlookers of the sacrifices inherent in every public school teacher’s life: “ ‘I do this for the money,’ said no teacher ever.”
At the rally, teachers spoke of the increasingly harsh conditions they faced at work and their negative impact on Chicago students.
“We get [to school] at around 5 or 5:30 every single morning,” explained one teacher from Farragut Career Academy. “On Mondays, I arrive a little bit late, around six and I usually leave around five. When I go home, I work, and I work during the weekends. And now they’re going to take away 7% of my income.”
Holly Charles, a teacher from West Englewood, explained that many schools do not even have enough funding to support a janitorial staff. “I didn’t get into teaching for the money,” she said, noting that she had worked in the CPS system for 30 years. “I’m bringing toilet paper from home, having to mop my own floor,” she says. “There’s not enough money for janitors. But I bet if you head into any of the CPS headquarters, you’ll find toilet paper and clean floors there.”
Another teacher, from Chicago’s South Shore High School, said that his school’s needs went far beyond a janitorial staff. “We don’t even have libraries in the school,” he said. “We need to reduce our class sizes, [but] they’re increasing class sizes. If they increase class sizes teachers are going to be managing students not teaching students.”
Limiting class sizes was a priority for most of the teachers I spoke to. “You have one teacher for every thirty kids,” explained With Thousands Marching in the Streets, Chicago Teachers Union Declares ‘This Means War!’ - Working In These Times: