Good morning, I don’t have to tell you school leaders in Chicago Public Schools are busy people.
We work year-round to prepare the children of Chicago for success. Right now, with just weeks left in the school year, we are preparing to celebrate milestones with our students, staff and the families. And once our students walk across the stage in June, school leaders will continue working into the summer, getting ready to welcome children back in August.
We show up every day and we work for the children of this city, for their families, for our teachers, for everyone that works with us in our buildings. All we want is to provide stability in our schools, to create communities where our children can learn.
I am proud to represent the members of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association, the union that represents workers whose only job and only wish is to make Chicago’s public schools be the very best they can be. I am also leading the bargaining team for our union as we negotiate the first and foundational collective bargaining agreement.
We are the union that represents all CPS Principals and Assistant Principals, and no one else speaks for us. I am here to tell you that our members are too busy to be drawn into political drama by people who claim to speak for us.
We continue to be baited to take a position that favors one political opinion over others and to make statements that go against our values of partnership and problem solving, to point fingers, instead of rolling up our sleeves and doing the work of finding common sense solutions.
While some seem focused on the distractions, CPAA is focused on negotiating at the bargaining table, doing the real work of creating the conditions for our school leaders to lead, and protect our leaders so they can actually DO something about the issues, see that is what Principals do, we don’t point fingers, we work TO SOLVE PROBLEMS, we have to!
What is even more troubling is what current leadership is asking our members to do in the coming weeks, a strategy that implies that it will put pressure on the school board and the city council.
We have been asked to build misleading budgets for our schools, based on hundreds of millions of dollars that we have no guarantee we will see BEFORE WE OPEN THE DOORS IN LESS THAN 3 short months.
Understand that we’re being asked to present things inaccurately to our Local School Councils and work for weeks to produce a budget by June. In July, we will likely have to tell hard working teachers and support personnel who left for the summer expecting to return to their jobs that have been cut. And the other staff that remain will find out they have only a few weeks to get ready to teach even bigger classes, and maybe a whole new subject because of YOUR failure to plan.
We NEED LEADERSHIP, not finger pointing. We need leadership, like yesterday, who can step in IMMEDIATELY, understanding the landscape and severity of the situation we are in. We need someone who has relationships and the ability to inspire confidence in the future of the district. We need someone who has an ACTIONABLE Plan for a local and downstate strategy to rebuild trust with our civic and philanthropic partners. If that individual happens to have other “credentials” that would be great, but what we need is leadership NOW!
Having us go forward with this magical budget will create distrust. It will create chaos. Cutting a school budget is hard. It’s painful. Raising hope and setting expectations based on a lie is irresponsible and destructive. It will make more work for Chicago’s school leaders, and it will make that work much harder.
We are the faces of the Chicago Public Schools for our staff and our neighborhoods. We are the ones who greet our young learners in the hallways. We are the ones who coach our teachers and SECAs. Who takes the calls from parents. Who work shoulder-to-shoulder with local school councils. Who builds community inside and outside our schools and we are too busy to waste time, We have 2 weeks to create a plan. What about YOU?
Take this lesson from a principal, passing the buck and pointing fingers just doesn’t make the grade. Having NO Plan is Planning to fail 300,000 children, again you are dumping the hard work back on a principal, where is the mutual accountability?
