CHICAGO — Thousands of Chicago teachers walked off the job Friday amid stalled contract negotiations, a one-day strike that union leaders described as an effort to pressure state lawmakers to address the dire financial outlook of the city’s public schools and colleges.
In the early morning hours when students would normally be shouldering backpacks and headed to class, teachers marched, chanted and waved signs at each of the city’s hundreds of public schools, accompanied in some cases by parents and children who wanted to show support.
The move by the Chicago Teachers Union means that the city’s nearly 400,000 students will miss class, throwing their families’ daily routines into disarray. The strike also is likely to snarl traffic for Chicago commuters thanks to a downtown rally that is expected to draw thousands of teachers and their allies, including fast-food workers, university students and professors and community groups.
Karen Lewis, president of the 27,000-member Chicago Teachers Union, said she hopes the disruption puts pressure on Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner (R), whose standoff with the Democratic legislature has left the state without a budget for nine months, squeezing public schools and universities and low-income students who depend on state-funded scholarships.
“The fact is that we need to do something major,” Lewis said in an interview Thursday. “When people are inconvenienced, they have to have some place to focus, and they need to focus on him.”
The union — recognizing that a financially crippled school system is limited in its ability to hire more teachers or boost compensation — also is calling for lawmakers to reform the state’s education funding formula.
Chicago’s school district, the nation’s third largest, is undeniably broke. It faces a growing structural deficit, largely due to growing pension payments, including a $700 million payment due in June.
This year it has a $480 billion budget gap that Chicago officials hoped to plug with help from state lawmakers; absent that assistance, they have sought to save money with employee layoffs, borrowing and furlough days.
Chicago Public Schools officials agree that the system’s fiscal crisis can be resolved only with the help of lawmakers in Springfield, the state capital. And like union leaders, they too have been frequent and ardent critics of Rauner.
Teachers started to picket at their schools starting at 6:30 a.m. Friday. There are also rallies planned later in the day at Chicago State University, a historically black college so squeezed by the budget standoff that every faculty member has received a layoff notice, and at Northeastern Illinois University, where there will be a “funeral march regarding the death of higher education,” according to the union.
