An Open Letter to the People Who Show Up for Our Kids Every Day
To the amazing teachers, school leaders, custodians, engineers, security officers, lunchroom staff, clerks, counselors, social workers, nurses, classroom aides, parent workers, and so many other public servants who show up for our kids every day:
Welcome back to school!
I have spent this summer traveling around the city, and everywhere I went, I found you already at work. I know what August looks like inside our buildings: floors stripped and refinished, rooms cleaned from the baseboards up, registration tables in front lobbies, classrooms with a library corner half-built three weeks before the first bell. I saw school leaders in empty buildings on a Saturday, trying to cover every position with the staff they have. And I have run into a lot of you in the aisles at Target, carts full of folders and markers and hand sanitizer, too often paid for out of your own pockets. I want you to know that it is seen.
I remember what these weeks feel like–the anxiety of the summer winding down and the incredible excitement of starting again, both sitting right on top of each other. I know what it is to sweat through a shirt by third period because the air conditioning in my room was not working, then pull on a sweater to sit in a break room that felt like an igloo. As a teacher, I remember sitting with my rosters and trying to picture five periods of faces I had not met yet - and wondering which kids would need what from me. As a principal at Burke Elementary in Washington Park, I reworked the master schedule again and again every August, because every line on it was somebody's day: whether a student with an IEP actually got their minutes, whether everyone in my building got the prep time they were owed and got it aligned with the colleagues they needed to plan with, whether the lunch I had scheduled for hundreds of children would work in my building or only on paper. I wondered whether the new teacher orientation I was planning would carry those teachers through their first hard week, and how to build professional development that would mean something to my veterans, who deserved better than a slideshow. I thought hard about how to bring every one of my staff into the real conversations about where our school was headed, because the engineer and the lunchroom manager and the clerk knew things about our families that I never would have learned otherwise.
That is why I want to say plainly what I have heard from you this summer, because I am not sure enough of it makes it into the rooms where decisions get made. This is an uneasy time. There is talk of layoffs, of positions left unfilled, of furloughs, and enough of it that people are reading the news to find out whether their own job still exists after the fall. Nobody does their best work while doing that math in their head, and nobody should spend August splitting their attention between a class list and a budget vote downtown.
I was a special education teacher, and then a principal, so I know what it takes to do this job well, because I needed the same things you do. Stability. A plan you can count on. Decisions made on time by the people responsible for making them. The ability to walk into your building thinking about your students instead of your job security.
There is too much noise around our schools right now, and very little of it is about you. It is about politics, positioning, and interests that have almost nothing to do with a Tuesday morning in a classroom. Almost every educator I talk with tells me some version of the same thing: “I did not come here for any of this, I came here for my students, so please let me do that work.”
That is the board I want to lead–one that does its own job well, so that you can do yours. That means passing a budget that is on time and built on money that actually exists rather than revenue somebody hopes will arrive later. When a budget is balanced on paper and not in reality, the correction lands on you: pink slips, unfilled positions, and furloughs. It means treating your contracts and your staffing as commitments rather than as variables to adjust when the numbers get tight. And it means a board that puts our kids' learning ahead of politics, and that stays out of the way of the people doing the work.
I will not promise you the road ahead is easy. What I can promise is that if I am elected, I will listen to your voices, because I know your working conditions are students’ learning conditions. I will push this board to make decisions transparently, early enough for you to plan your year, and with the people who work in schools before the vote rather than after it.
You have carried this district through years when the people in power were not just unaligned but fighting each other in public, and you kept showing up for kids through all of it. You should not have to keep doing that.
So as you walk back into your buildings this month, I want you to hear this from someone who has done this work: I see you. I appreciate you more than you know, and this city is better because you keep showing up.
Have a wonderful school year, and thank you for all that you do for our children and communities.
Jessica Biggs
CPS Parent, Former Principal, Board of Education Member, District 6