Chicago teachers remain on strike with negotiations on major issues virtually stalled, the Chicago Teachers Union said Wednesday night. That’s issues like class size, how much prep time teachers will have, support staffing levels, pay, and the length of the contract. Mayor Lori Lightfoot is insisting that the money simply doesn’t exist to fund things like that, while the teachers say there’s more money than she’s admitting.
“We understand if we can’t fully get our demand” on class size,” CTU President Jesse Sharkey said, “but I can’t bring back to our members and say here’s a few thousand dollars for your high school” as one proposal would provide, spreading $700,000 across 86 high schools to relieve overcrowding. Chalkbeat reports that “negotiators have largely agreed on staffing targets for additional nurses and social workers; what remains is a way to ensure the city delivers on its hiring promises.” Because if you get promises for nurses and social workers but no actual nurses and social workers, what’s the point?
”They are going to have to live within their means,” Lightfoot has said about the union’s demands, but the union’s demands are about Chicago’s children. The union is asking for support for 16,000 homeless students—are those students “going to have to live within their means”? The union is asking for nurses and counselors in the schools—are students who get sick or experience trauma “going to have to live within their means”? Special education students in particular are supposed to have small classes, but they don’t. I guess they’re just living within their means. And what about teacher’s assistants like Willie Cousins, who tells his story in the video below, who take home $2,000 a month for jobs that require them to live in Chicago and deal with its housing costs? He lives within his means—by working a second job at Walmart rather than being home for his kids.
In short, there’s no end in sight.