Mayor Brandon Johnson’s letter to Illinois Senate President Don Harmon last month vowing not to shut down selective enrollment schools was directly edited by a Chicago Teachers Union lobbyist — and was preceded by an earlier version that made no such promise, the Tribune has learned.
During the waning days of the latest Springfield session, the mayor made a last-minute plea to Harmon in a letter asking him to not call for a vote the bill to extend a moratorium on all Chicago Public Schools closings. That capped off a weekslong power struggle between the CTU, which also opposed the legislation, and state legislators who wanted to ink the two-year extension to ensure selective enrollment schools would not be shuttered.
Harmon pointed to Johnson’s promise in the late May letter as evidence of the trust between the two officials, saying the mayor’s “commitment to me is even more clear and more binding than the bill would have been.”
But public records provided to the Tribune reveal a CTU official helped craft the eleventh-hour letter that likely saved the teachers union and Johnson from an embarrassing defeat in the statehouse, as well as an earlier, watered-down version.
As the spring session wrapped up and Johnson was urgently trying to stop the bill from passing, he first tried to appeal to Harmon without explicitly promising to protect funding for Chicago selective enrollment schools or keep them open. Days later, he followed up with the second letter that did agree to those points. Only then did Harmon opt out of calling the bill for a vote, citing his “trust” in Johnson’s intentions.
Hours before Harmon received that final version of Johnson’s pledge, a mayoral staffer sent an internal email titled “Updated letter,” indicating that Kurt Hilgendorf, a registered CTU lobbyist, revised the language.
“As discussed, Kurt, Melanie, and I took a stab at the letter,” Michael Ciaccio, deputy director of intergovernmental affairs, wrote to senior Johnson officials including deputy education mayor Jennifer Johnson. He was referencing Hilgendorf and Melanie Berks, another mayoral staffer. A file labeled “Document4.docx” was attached.
An additional Freedom of Information Act request to Harmon’s office revealed two versions of Johnson’s letter were sent to the Senate president, with the first one stopping short of making a concrete promise to keep all selective enrollment schools open.
Though Johnson’s close relationship with the powerful labor group that propelled his rise to mayor is no secret, granting any lobbyist this degree of influence in drafting a letter on behalf of the chief executive, much less to a lawmaker on legislation-related matters, is unusual.
A mayoral spokesman on Thursday provided a statement downplaying the access.
“When it comes to legislation that could negatively impact our City’s public school system, it is essential to seek input from stakeholders that could be directly impacted by these policies, including families, community partners, labor, the Chicago Board of Education and other elected officials,” Johnson spokesman Cassio Mendoza said. “Ultimately, it is the mayor who has final say on policy, as well as correspondence to legislators, coming from the City of Chicago.”
Meanwhile, a CTU spokesperson pointed to contract language that calls upon the union to work on education-related “legislative strategy,” but said Johnson’s predecessors did not cooperate.
“We routinely engage with staff of the Speaker of the House and Senate President, from helping to create fundamental legislation that protects our students and members to establishing the Elected School Board,” the CTU statement read. “However, our city’s current leadership is the first to approach this requirement in good faith.”
Asked Thursday about the letters, Harmon in a statement said “The mayor’s personal assurances to me were always very clear. I asked for a letter that documented those assurances.”
The high-profile legislation in question was introduced by state Rep. Margaret Croke, a Democrat from Chicago’s North Side. It was initially aimed at protecting selective enrollment schools from closures before being amended to encompass all the city’s public schools. Croke filed it after Johnson’s school board last year announced its intention to focus on neighborhood schools in a forthcoming five-year plan.
Despite denials from the board, that approach worried school choice advocates who felt the policy would lead to selective enrollment schools being shut down before a fully elected school board gets installed. That pressure came to a head in May when a Senate committee advanced Croke’s legislation on the same day Johnson was making his rounds inside the Illinois State Capitol building.
But weeks later, word got around Springfield about a letter Johnson sent to Harmon, urging him to not call the bill during the final days of the spring legislative session. At that point, all the bill needed was a final passage vote in the Senate, also controlled by Democrats, before it could be sent to Pritzker for his signature.
In the letter, Johnson said CPS wouldn’t close selective enrollment schools, nor would the district disproportionately cut their funding or change their admissions standards before 2027 — all things Croke’s bill would’ve required. After that, Harmon agreed to not call the bill.
“The mayor has always been emphatically clear with me that he does not intend to close schools, he does not intend to under-resource schools, he does not intend to undermine the selective enrollment schools,” Harmon, an Oak Park Democrat, said moments after the Senate adjourned for the spring on May 26. “I think his commitment to me is even more clear and more binding than the bill would have been.”
“This is a business based on trust and in my view the mayor promised more than the bill did,” Harmon said.
The Tribune’s open records requests revealed the existence of the prior letter from Johnson to Harmon that lacked such a pledge.
On May 21 at 1:45 p.m., Johnson’s deputy mayor of intergovernmental affairs, Sydney Holman, e-mailed a letter from the mayor to Harmon’s chief of staff, Ashley Jenkins-Jordan, indicating the “narrative of closing selective enrollment schools is patently false.” But nowhere in the letter does the mayor overtly promise that he won’t close any selective enrollment schools.
Johnson’s letter said Croke’s bill “ignores the intent” of the CPS board’s five-year plan, which calls for an “analysis of policy, practice and programs of study that have undermined the equity in areas of access, quality and outcomes.” The mayor also raised concern about how the bill would “uphold current CPS admissions policies that have consequently resulted in dramatic declines” in Black students attending top-tier selective enrollment schools, and he said the legislation would “usurp local control of the largest school district in Illinois without evidence that necessitates state intervention.”
“If passed, the legislation would unilaterally supersede the authority of the Chicago Board of Education by codifying a budget system that privileges a select group of schools over the majority,” Johnson said in the letter.
He also said the bill doesn’t distinguish between “traditional public schools and charter schools that are also funded by public dollars but have not been held to the same standards.”
“The Chicago Board of Education must be able to hold charter school operators accountable to the same fiscal, instructional, and operational standards as all public schools,” Johnson said.
But two days later, on May 23 about 11 a.m., Holman sent Jenkins-Jordan a revised letter from Johnson that reiterated his request for Harmon to not call Croke’s bill but this time made a clear pledge to not disrupt the operations of selective enrollment schools before the fully elected school board is seated in 2027.
That came about four hours after Johnson deputy Ciaccio’s email with the updated letter that the CTU lobbyist helped rewrite.
“The District will not close selective enrollment schools nor will the District make disproportionate budget cuts to selective enrollment schools,” Johnson wrote. “The district will maintain admissions standards at selective enrollment schools.”
In a Thursday statement, Croke said the evolving nature of the mayor’s letter to Harmon is “further proof that the (Johnson) administration was working in overdrive to empower an appointed and unelected school board to subvert democracy and prevent parent voices from driving decisions around our schools, with the end goal of causing irreparable harm to selective enrollment and magnet schools.”
A moratorium on closing CPS schools is set to expire in January under the 2021 state law creating an elected school board. But after extensive haggling on how to implement an elected board, Gov. J.B. Pritzker in March signed a measure that won’t put a fully elected, 21-member school board in place until January 2027. Beginning this coming January, in a plan supported by Johnson and the CTU, the school board will be composed of 10 elected members and 11 others, including the board president, appointed by the mayor.
Meanwhile, Croke’s amended legislation called for the Chicago school board to be barred from approving “any school closings, consolidations, or phase-outs” until Feb. 1, 2027, instead of Jan. 15 of next year. What’s more, it also required the board to not take any action resulting in “a disproportionate decrease” in the funding of selective enrollment schools compared to other CPS schools, and barred any changes to admissions standards at selective enrollment schools until Feb. 1, 2027.
Pritzker had expressed support for Croke’s bill, saying any decisions about school closures should be made by a fully elected board.
Despite the CTU labeling the legislation as “racist,” it breezed through the House in a bipartisan 92-8 vote, with eight Democrats from the House’s legislative supermajority voting against the measure. In early May, it passed without opposition through the Senate Executive Committee, the same day Johnson came to Springfield to lobby Pritzker and lawmakers for more funding that’s critical to Chicago’s operations. During a news conference that day, Johnson was asked if he felt snubbed that the bill passed through committee on the same day as his visit to the Illinois State Capitol.
“There’s a process that the General Assembly goes through. I understand that process. And we’re going to stick to that process,” he said.
The CTU was Johnson’s biggest financial backer during the 2023 mayoral campaign, contributing $2.3 million, or one-fifth of his total political fund, by the April runoff. That doesn’t include other affiliated teachers unions. Since his swearing in, CTU continues to rank in the top three of his biggest donors.
The Tribune’s Gregory Royal Pratt and A.D. Quig contributed reporting.
