When can a budget crisis not fairly be called a crisis? Perhaps when the crisis is something that\u2019s been obviously coming for months, if not years, and demanded action long ago.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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\u2019t furnish hundreds of millions to bail out CPS.<\/p>\n
That school board President Sean Harden, who serves as the mayor\u2019s 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\u2019t include a CPS bailout among his requests for help from Springfield in the past spring session \u2014 precisely because he knew it would go nowhere and might jeopardize his other asks.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019s largest municipal junk-bond issuer.<\/p>\n
Meeting that threshold likely won\u2019t be a problem. Eleven of 21 board members are Johnson appointees. Of the 10 elected in November, seven consistently have resisted Johnson and Harden\u2019s reckless financial maneuvers to date. But that\u2019s not enough opposition to stop CPS from lurching substantially further toward insolvency if Harden and interim school Superintendent Macquline King choose that route.<\/p>\n
For CPS, there\u2019s a short-term issue and there\u2019s a long-term issue. Both should concern every Chicagoan.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s public schools today. We will have more to say on that larger matter later.<\/p>\n
The short-term problem \u2014 next year\u2019s shortfall \u2014 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\u2019 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\u2019s obligation, but Johnson and his predecessor, Lori Lightfoot, strived to get CPS to take on some of the plan\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Given the district\u2019s financial strains, there\u2019s 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\u2019s not a small amount to cut, even in a budget well exceeding $9 billion. But, still.<\/p>\n
This predicament could be seen a mile away, and Johnson \u2014 backed by his former employer and erstwhile ally, the Chicago Teachers Union \u2014 has insisted since taking office on generous yearly raises for teachers who already are among the nation\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The CTU\/Johnson strategy from the beginning has been to do next to nothing about a foreseeably dire budget situation \u2014 in fact, make it significantly worse \u2014 and wait until the crisis got so acute that the state or some other benefactor would swoop in to the rescue. That\u2019s fiscal and managerial malfeasance. Why should it be rewarded?<\/p>\n
Oh, yes. The children.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s future depends in no small part on giving those kids a good education.<\/p>\n
By now, a majority of Chicagoans have caught on to CTU\u2019s true purpose, which is to bolster its membership ranks no matter how low CPS\u2019 student population drops. That doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s kids. But the rhetoric increasingly doesn\u2019t land, especially given how CTU\u2019s very own former organizer sits on the fifth floor.<\/p>\n
We feel terrible for the families who will bear the brunt<\/a> of the likely cutbacks to come. But this challenging upcoming school year unfortunately is the price we will have to pay for epic mismanagement.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here<\/a> or email letters@chicagotribune.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When can a budget crisis not fairly be called a crisis? Perhaps when the crisis is something that\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":91102,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[960,6083,5386,1818,1269],"class_list":{"0":"post-91101","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-chicago","9":"tag-editorials","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-illinois","12":"tag-opinion"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114913342015537767","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91101\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}