Chicago's new school board and the coming elected one.
For the time being Chicago has an appointed school board.
That is scheduled to change next year when Chicago voters will get to elect 10 members of a new 21-member school board.
The remainder of the board at that point, including a board president, will be appointed by the mayor. The board will be fully elected by January 2027.
There are still discussions about how the districts will be drawn in order to more fully reflect the diversity of the city and its students.
Newly elected Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has replaced all but one member of the CPS board that served under Lori Lightfoot.
Gone is the board president, long-time progressive school reformer, former state senator for two decades, Miguel del Valle.
Johnson announced his choices last Wednesday, naming Jianan Shi of the parent advocacy group Raise Your Hand to be the new board president.
The lone Lightfoot appointee who was reappointed, history professor Elizabeth Todd-Breland, will serve as the board’s vice president.
Elizabeth Todd-Breland was a guest on Hitting Left with the Klonsky Brothers in 2019.
The other new members are: Mary Fahey Hughes, Mariela Estrada, Rudy Lozano Jr., Michelle Morales, and Tanya Woods.
From my experience these are good choices to lead the city’s schools.
On a personal note, Rudy Lozano Jr. - a community activist - was in the same elementary school class as my youngest daughter, now a teacher in New York.
Which just goes to show how old I am.
Chicago will face it’s challenges when we get an elected board, which I have long supported.
Elected school boards across the country and across our state have been targeted by MAGAs and their billionaire funders.
Even though Chicago is a deep blue city, the huge number of board members (21) may make it easy for right wingers to pick off a few and cause disruption.
That’s exactly what happened this past April in hundreds of elected school board races in Illinois.
Although most of these MAGAs in Illinois school board races were defeated, they have not given up.
Plus the MAGA candidates goal was not just to win, but to incite and cause divisions in the communities.
Awake Illinois, a statewide conservative parent group, is leading the charge, opposing Illinois’ sex ed standards to prevent students from becoming what it calls “sexualized illiterate radicals.”
Prior to the elections last April Awake Illinois hosted candidate training sessions led by the Leadership Institute, a Virginia-based organization that trains conservative candidates around the country.
Groups like Awake Illinois, Action PAC and Moms for Liberty are just some of the local and national groups, well funded, the are calling for book banning, attacking critical race theory, targeting LGBTQ+ students and inclusive curriculum.