When can a budget crisis not fairly be called a crisis? Perhaps when the crisis is something that’s been obviously coming for months, if not years, and demanded action long ago.
Members of the Chicago Board of Education appointed by Mayor Brandon Johnson, as well as the interim Chicago Public Schools CEO hired out of Johnson’s administration, are calling for Gov. JB Pritzker to order a special session of the legislature to bail out a district facing what it says is a $734 million budget hole for the coming school year.
The requests for the special session came this week, a little over a month before the Aug. 28 deadline for the school board to finalize its budget. Needless to say, there won’t be a special session. Pritzker and the Democratic leaders of both the House and Senate have made it clear repeatedly that the state itself is tapped out and can’t furnish hundreds of millions to bail out CPS.
That school board President Sean Harden, who serves as the mayor’s chief CPS mouthpiece, would seek a special session at this late stage is revealing of how unserious Johnson and his allies are about properly managing a system that by any measure is tremendously bloated. The time for legislative sessions, special or otherwise, was months and months ago. The mayor, in fact, didn’t include a CPS bailout among his requests for help from Springfield in the past spring session — precisely because he knew it would go nowhere and might jeopardize his other asks.
So, as Johnson has demanded in vain for over a year, Harden and other mayoral allies on the board once again are talking about taking on hundreds of millions more in high-priced debt just to get through the next school year without having to make meaningful budget cuts. And, unlike in the spring, when a minority of school board members took advantage of a supermajority requirement for budget amendments and rejected Harden’s request for authority to go deeper into debt, this time around Harden needs only a simple majority to add more liabilities to the balance sheet of the nation’s largest municipal junk-bond issuer.
Meeting that threshold likely won’t be a problem. Eleven of 21 board members are Johnson appointees. Of the 10 elected in November, seven consistently have resisted Johnson and Harden’s reckless financial maneuvers to date. But that’s not enough opposition to stop CPS from lurching substantially further toward insolvency if Harden and interim school Superintendent Macquline King choose that route.
For CPS, there’s a short-term issue and there’s a long-term issue. Both should concern every Chicagoan.
Over the longer haul, the district will have to consolidate a large number of schools and rationalize its workforce. As it stands, CPS is sized for a student population far larger than the 325,000 actually attending Chicago’s public schools today. We will have more to say on that larger matter later.
The short-term problem — next year’s shortfall — can be addressed in part by forcing the city of Chicago to pay the $175 million Mayor Johnson has insisted CPS should shoulder for the Municipal Employees’ Annuity and Benefit Fund, a pension fund serving nonteaching employees of CPS, as well as some workers for the city and other agencies. By state law, that pension plan is the city’s obligation, but Johnson and his predecessor, Lori Lightfoot, strived to get CPS to take on some of the plan’s funding responsibility. CPS did so in years when it was flush with federal pandemic cash, but refused to do so last year so that it could pay for teacher raises negotiated as part of a new four-year collective bargaining agreement.
Given the district’s financial strains, there’s no good reason to float junk-rated debt to cover that cost now, especially when not obligated by law. So without the $175 million pension payment, the true deficit should be more like $559 million. That’s not a small amount to cut, even in a budget well exceeding $9 billion. But, still.
This predicament could be seen a mile away, and Johnson — backed by his former employer and erstwhile ally, the Chicago Teachers Union — has insisted since taking office on generous yearly raises for teachers who already are among the nation’s highest-paid while also opposing the consolidation of any schools and associated job reductions. About a third of CPS schools are at less than half of student capacity, and many are at a third or lower.
The CTU/Johnson strategy from the beginning has been to do next to nothing about a foreseeably dire budget situation — in fact, make it significantly worse — and wait until the crisis got so acute that the state or some other benefactor would swoop in to the rescue. That’s fiscal and managerial malfeasance. Why should it be rewarded?
Oh, yes. The children.
Perhaps the most pernicious facet of this game-of-chicken strategizing is that hundreds of thousands of Chicago students rely on CPS, and the city’s future depends in no small part on giving those kids a good education.
By now, a majority of Chicagoans have caught on to CTU’s true purpose, which is to bolster its membership ranks no matter how low CPS’ student population drops. That doesn’t stop union leaders, of course, from attempting to paint those who reject the never-ending requests for hundreds of millions or even billions in tax increases as cold-hearted opponents of educating Chicago’s kids. But the rhetoric increasingly doesn’t land, especially given how CTU’s very own former organizer sits on the fifth floor.
We feel terrible for the families who will bear the brunt of the likely cutbacks to come. But this challenging upcoming school year unfortunately is the price we will have to pay for epic mismanagement.
Once they see no knight in shining armor coming to the rescue, these unserious people tasked with running our schools finally must take some accountability and begin the process of making difficult decisions about the future of CPS within the means available to support it.
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