Lawmakers in Illinois State Capital Back Plan to Take Control Away from Chicago Mayor by Creating Elected School Board

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot faces loss of control over the Chicago school district as Democratic legislators intend to form elected school boards to replace Lightfoot’s appointed board.

Democratic Illinois lawmakers have plan to take control from mayor by passing legislation that ensures a fully elected school board.npr

There has been a lot of back and forth over how to choose the members for the CPS school board. Despite the fact that the Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot campaigned on the promise to establish an elected school board, once in office she flip flopped and stated that she was against electing school board members.

During her 2019 mayoral campaign, Lightfoot expressed support for an elected school board, putting forth a deliberate method for designing an elected school board to ensure that parents and other stakes holders with “skin in the game,” would be represented. She said that perhaps before running for the board that candidates should be required to serve first on local school councils to gain experience. Lightfoot stated in interviews”

"I want to make sure that parents truly have a seat at the table. I don't want to change one broken system for another that is a system that, if you are clouted and you have access to resources, then you have a seat at the table. I think that would be taking us in exactly the wrong direction. So those details really matter." The mayoral candidate said she wanted to “make sure that parents truly have a seat at the table.”

However, following Lightfoot’s election win, she asked for the resignations of the seven members of the Chicago Board of Education and then appointed her own replacements just weeks later. As for the elected school board, she claimed she wanted more time to study the proposal.

Then Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Jesse Sharkey denounced the move and insisted that Lightfoot kept her campaign promise of instituting the procedures to elect a school board.

“CPS continues to be plagued by the chronic lack of transparency, accountability and democracy that underpins mayoral control—and it’s time for the mayor to keep her campaign promise for an elected, representative school board,” Sharkey said in a statement. “We need a board that is elected by the people and that works for the people. In the meantime, if this board is to be different than other mayorally [appointed] boards of the past, they must immediately address critical needs in our school communities.”

The CTU claimed that upon taking office Lightfoot had “(derailed) legislation while refusing to engage with the very grassroots forces that have been fighting for this most basic democratic right.”

In the two years since she was elected, Lightfoot has not proposed her own model for an elected school board. However, she has spoken out against bills introduced by state Sen. Robert Martwick, which would create a 21-member board in 2023.

The push from parents and advocates to get an elected board has gone on for years in Chicago. The city is the only one in the state to have its school board appointed by the mayor.

Jitu Brown, board president of the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization, has spoken about the decades-long battle in Chicago for an elected school board. He said that the desire for an elected school board was a direct response to past decisions by school board members appointed by the mayor to close down multiple schools on the city’s South and West sides, which disproportionately affected Black and Latino low-income families.

In 2019, the Illinois House of Representatives approved a bill, for the third time in three years, that created an elected board to oversee CPS. Then-Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot tweeted her support for an elected school board, but as mayor she later criticized the bill as a “recipe for chaos and disaster. The measure was never voted on by the Senate, and once more failed.

Moises Moreno, director of the Pilsen Alliance, echoed community concerns, stating that an appointed board isn’t responsive to community concerns.

“When the Board of Education is appointed by the mayor, it does not listen to the community,” Moreno said. “It shuts down schools, it shuts down communities, budget cut, they’re sending kids back into schools that are not safe. If we had an elected school board, perhaps communities would be respected.”

As the support for an elected school board continued to pick up steam, heading towards another vote, Lightfoot backed a new, last minute proposal in an effort to hold onto control of the board. This would be a hybrid board that would ensure that City Hall continued to have power and influence over what was decided.

The legislation was introduced by Sen. Kimberly Lightford in the Senate. It would create a hybrid school board with the majority of the members still being appointed by the Mayor and two elected seats.

Supporters of the fully elected school board say they want to ensure that members of the board can be held accountable by the public through regular elections. A hybrid school board, backed by Lightfoot, would ensure that the majority of the board remained political appointees, letting the mayor keep control.

Now Democratic lawmakers in the state capital are supporting a new plan to wrest control from the mayor's office and create an elected school board in Chicago. This effort has been given momentum by protests and articles about how Lightfoot has failed to deliver on almost any of her campaign promised included the elected school board. The legislators feel confident in the bill’s chances for being passed due to the involvement of so many parents, teachers, and advocates.

Chicago Public Schools, serves over 300,000 students and has a budget around $8 billion. With its shaky finances and academic shortcomings, it has been a particular problem for the mayor and is one of the major issues inherited from the previous administration that she was supposed to fix.

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