Almost a year’s worth of bargaining between the Chicago Teachers Union and Chicago Public Schools could culminate in a tentative agreement Monday.
The union will present a package of proposals to its big bargaining team of rank-and-file members at 1 p.m. If the team votes for it, the package will be solidified as a tentative agreement and go up for a vote in the union’s House of Delegates and by full CTU membership.
In a statement Friday afternoon, CPS said it’s “pleased with the progress that has been made” and its “goal has always been to reach a fair contract resolution that recognizes the significant contributions of our educators while being mindful of our budgetary limitations and fiduciary responsibilities.”
CTU, meanwhile, said in a statement its package of proposals would “transform CPS for the better for students, educators and school communities.”
Among other things, the package of proposals puts $10 million into sports programs and adds 30 more sustainable community schools — community hubs that provide health and social support. It promises to hire more librarians, enforce class size limits and prioritize bilingual educator staffing.
Under Mayor Brandon Johnson, negotiations were markedly different from recent years. CTU has blamed past mayors for stonewalling progress on bargaining, but this time around, it repeatedly blamed CPS Chief Executive Officer Martinez for not pushing a deal through.
School Board President Sean Harden called a last-minute meeting last Wednesday to convene key union and city leaders — including Martinez, the mayor and CTU President Stacy Davis Gates — to try to get the final proposal across the finish line. Davis Gates reiterated to the press afterward that Martinez was holding up the bargaining process.
“He was elected by no one, and he is the only one invested in not ending this,” Davis Gates said.
Negotiations have been ongoing since April 16, 2024, and both sides have spent long days and nights, including holidays, to resolve 748 of the union’s asks. In the final weeks of negotiations, the disagreements were minor and mostly focused on non-economic asks. Last week, both parties said they were $10 million away from a compromise.
They said the three final sticking points were: time between teachers evaluations, pay raises for veteran teachers and planning time built into the elementary school day.
This week’s late bargaining conversations paid off, as the two sides met halfway on the final sticking points, according to sources. CPS ultimately agreed to raise salaries for veteran teachers and shift evaluations for teachers who have consistently been rated proficient to every three years. CTU settled for the district’s offer of 10 additional minutes of prep time.
The union dropped a proposal that Service Employees International Union Local 73 said would have taken away special education teacher assistants from its membership and given them to CTU. The conflict had driven a wedge for months between the two historically aligned unions.
Indeed, the complexities of contract negotiations extended far beyond the final proposals of 4% cost-of-living increases for teachers’ raises and thousands of additional staff members.
As a former union organizer, Johnson has a close alignment with the CTU, which spent millions to get him into office. Johnson’s relationship with Martinez soured last summer over how to pay a $175 million reimbursement to a pension fund for non-teacher employees.
Martinez refused to take out a loan as requested by the mayor. Johnson threatened to fire the CEO over the conflict, which led to the resignation of all seven members of his previously appointed school board. Martinez was fired without cause in December of last year by a newly appointed school board, and is allowed to stay in his role until June.
The schools’ chief has argued for months that paying the city for the pension fund would leave no money for the new contract. There is just $139 from the city’s taxing districts available to settle the budget for the 2024-25 school year.
Harden delayed a vote last week that would have opened the door for a borrowing plan to allow CPS to absorb the costs of the underfunded pension fund for municipal workers, mostly CPS employees. The payment shifted to CPS in 2020 in an effort to financially detangle the district from the city. It ramps up over a 39-year period.
Annette Guzman, the city’s budget director and Jill Jaworski, the city’s chief financial officer, sent a letter to City Council Friday afternoon about the pension fund. They wrote that Martinez has been “non-committal at best and negligent at worst on CPS’s reciprocal agreement with the City.”
The payment to the city needs to be fulfilled by March 30, when the city is obligated to close its books for the year.
Though the question of who would absorb it has wreaked havoc for multiple bodies of school boards in recent months, Guzman and Jaworski said in the letter that the city would “manage this reduction in budgeted revenue in the short-term as we continue to work with the Board of Education, City Council and the State on solutions to both responsibly disentangle our finances and bolster the district’s finances.”
The full financial impact on the city remains to be seen.
