Illinois Budget Crisis Threatens to Slash $480 Million from Chicago Schools Mid-Year
Chicago teachers are voting this week to authorize a strike, though it wouldn’t occur any time prior to March 2016. Catalyst Chicago quotes Karen Lewis, President of the Chicago Teachers Union, explaining, “We don’t want a strike; we’d like to have a settled contract.” But the contract negotiations have dragged on and on and have been complicated by the budget crisis in Illinois, one of two states that, by mid-December, lacks a state budget.
Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post reports: “The union’s contract with the city expired last summer, and talks have been deadlocked.” Here is how Catalyst describes some of the impasse: “The district says the CTU is asking for an additional $1.3 billion in spending it can’t afford.” “Among the union’s contract proposals: enforceable lower class sizes; full-day free preschool for low-income 3-and 4-year-olds; more community schools; fewer standardized tests; an end to school closings and charter expansions; and a minimum $15 hourly salary for all CPS employees.”
The Chicago Tribune presents the demands from the school district’s point of view: “According to the district, CTU wants more than 1,000 new school nurses, psychologists and social workers; hundreds of counselors and case managers; a 3 percent salary increase; and pay for snow days. The district also asserts it would have to hire more than 5,000 teachers to accommodate a union demand to shrink classroom sizes.” Jesse Sharkey, vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union responds that the board of education, “has rejected every demand to improve conditions in our schools and asked for a contract that amounts to $653 million in cuts, not counting the staff cuts.”
This is not merely a teachers’ contract dispute. Underneath the financial problems in
