Brandon Johnson wants Chicago Public Schools to take out the equivalent of a payday loan to address its budget challenges. That’s what passes these days for making the tough decisions on the fifth floor.
CPS is facing a budget hole exceeding $500 million and has proposed a $9.9 billion operating budget for the budget year that just began, balancing the books by making cutbacks in the central office and laying off more than 300 Chicago Teachers Union members, as well as restructuring some debt and other money-saving measures. Most of those who were laid off are likely to be rehired at other schools within the mammoth system in coming months, but still the layoffs of CTU members were a bridge too far for Mayor Johnson, who owes his present position to the union’s political backing and once made his living as a CTU lobbyist.
On July 11, the day after the CPS budget was released, Johnson was harshly critical of any plan to “cut our school district,” saying, “That’s not what the people of Chicago elected me to do.”
Let’s put that another way: Johnson knows that the CTU didn’t invest millions to elect its own mayor only to have its membership rolls reduced.
In that context, Johnson’s outrage was not surprising but still was odd because the Chicago Board of Education actually is made up of his appointees.
Even CPS CEO Pedro Martinez, whom Johnson inherited from mayoral predecessor Lori Lightfoot, stayed in the role with Johnson’s enthusiastic backing. Since Johnson’s election, Martinez has taken pains to execute Johnson’s controversial schools agenda, including implementing a new school budgeting system that favors lightly populated neighborhood schools over better-regarded selective enrollment, charter and magnet schools, many of which are in far higher demand by parents of school-age kids.
Ordinarily, a mayor would not be surprised by how his own school system is budgeting, but our CTU-Mayor duopoly has everything topsy-turvy.
Johnson should know that Martinez has no choice but to face the fiscal reality that has been plain for months despite his (and CTU’s) complaints that the state and federal governments aren’t doing enough to prop up a system slowly collapsing due to running far too many schools and employing too many workers (yes, CTU members) for the number of served students. A more pragmatic mayor would be working with his CEO to consolidate schools and allocating resources more efficiently.
To his credit, Martinez at least is attempting to be responsible, even in the face of the mayor pressing CPS to take out a high-interest loan of about $300 million to help cover its costs and to give teachers raises under a collective bargaining agreement currently being negotiated.
CPS has taken the highly unusual tack of saying no to Johnson’s ill-conceived plan and rightly is sticking to its guns, at least for now.
In a July 8 memo to the mayor’s office, obtained by Chalkbeat, CPS nixed the idea of adding more debt to the $9.3 billion in outstanding debt that makes CPS the “the largest junk bond issuer in the United States,” in the district’s own words. Here’s how CPS described the mayor’s idea, according to Chalkbeat: “This could be thought of as putting your credit card payments that you can no longer afford on your mortgage payments.”
To our minds, it’s more like taking out a high-interest loan from an online lender because your credit card is maxed out. But in an administration where bad decisions are all too common (see Brighton Park migrant camp on toxic land), it’s refreshing to see CPS tell the mayor his desperate suggestions for appeasing his CTU pals are irresponsible.
We understand that Johnson believes he owes CTU for his unlikely political rise. But he is the mayor of all of Chicago. CTU’s membership numbers nearly 30,000. Last we checked, Chicago’s total population was around 2.7 million.
The job of any mayor, Johnson included, is to make decisions based on the reasonable and responsible options before them. For a school system already paying $817 million annually just to cover debt service and facing a budget hole nearing $900 million next year once this year’s budget is finalized, a high-interest loan in the hundreds of millions is akin to the last step a household takes before declaring Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
By trying to pressure Martinez into this reckless loan, Johnson and CTU are willing to further mortgage CPS not only to solve a short-term political problem but also seemingly to lay the groundwork for another round of pleading next year with state lawmakers for a Chicago schools bailout due to a fiscal morass largely of their own creation. It’s hard to imagine such a gambit convincing state lawmakers and Gov. J.B. Pritzker, especially when they must also confront a $700 million budget hole facing the Chicago area’s transit agencies.
The day of reckoning is nearing for CTU and the mayor. Exacerbating the costs when that moment arrives by having the country’s largest junk-bond issuer add yet more high-cost debt must not be allowed to happen.
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