Crains Chicago Opinion: CPS board must level with parents about this risky budget maneuver

This story was originally published by Crains Chicago Business.

Jessica Biggs | August 10, 2026 10:22 AM CDT

Last week, the Chicago Public Schools Board of Education passed an amended budget for the school year ahead that relies on funds from Springfield that simply don’t yet exist — and are unlikely to materialize this year at all.

As I said in the board meeting, the amendment was delusional at best, and deeply harmful to students and working people at worst.

I voted against the plan because experts — and CPS’s own history — say this is likely to lead to mass layoffs, furloughs for workers, credit rating agency downgrades, increased borrowing costs, and other big problems for the school district.

I have worked alongside CPS employees my entire career: as a teacher, as a principal, and now on this board. The custodians, security officers, clerks, and paraprofessionals in our buildings know before anyone else when a budget is real and when it is not, because they are the ones who pay the consequences when the money does not show up. Too often that means layoffs, positions left unfilled, and cuts that land in schools months after the vote that caused them.

Of course, I agree that we must advocate together in Springfield for fully funded schools. We all have an obligation to fight for every dollar for our public schools that we can. And it’s true that Springfield has not yet funded CPS to a level considered adequate by its own funding formula.

But the reality is that funding can’t be counted on in the budgeting process until the state appropriates it. By all expert accounts, getting this appropriation done in the upcoming veto session is a long shot at best. So penciling it into the CPS budget was a reckless and irresponsible maneuver.

We can all understand where my colleagues who voted in favor of this amended budget are coming from. As a board member who has to grapple with decisions around tough votes all the time, I certainly get it.

The budget proposed by CPS CEO Dr. Maquline King, while balanced and fiscally responsible, included painful layoffs. No one wants to be blamed for voting for layoffs — especially in an election year. So, instead of taking an honest assessment of the circumstances, leveling with the public, and passing a difficult budget, my colleagues swapped in an amendment that might seem less painful at first blush.

The problem is that, by betting the district’s finances on revenue that does not yet exist, they put the district in an even worse fiscal position. If the Legislature does not pass the needed funding, chaos will hit us right in the middle of the school year, as will a nearly guaranteed credit downgrade, higher borrowing costs, and even more layoffs.

In fact, the amended budget is expected to double the layoffs in the original proposed budget, force furloughs district-wide, and cost CPS hundreds of millions in borrowing that should be reaching classrooms instead. Every one of those dollars is one pulled out of a school and handed to a big bank.

CPS pursued this same maneuver nearly a decade ago, and the results were catastrophic. I was a principal at Burke Elementary on Chicago’s South Side at the time. At Burke, we experienced the furloughs, the layoffs, and the lost cost-of-living increases for our workers. My staff and my school community got short-changed by this same risky move, and it did real harm to our kids and the people who show up for them every single day.

The CPS board members who passed the budget amendment last week, in looking for a less painful path with fewer hard decisions, may well have set us on the same disastrous course.

We need leadership that will be honest with families and Chicagoans. I’m a CPS mom. I hear from fellow parents every day that they are sick of the political games and PR spin. They want to know what to expect, and when. If the intention of those who voted for this budget is to try to force Springfield to fund it, then they’ve got to work to educate and activate parents to get down to the Capitol to lobby alongside us. It’s time to tell parents the full truth–and that includes being honest about the risks of this strategy.

I stand ready to work with anyone who is up to that challenge, and I’ll be the first one in Springfield demanding full funding for our schools. But the road ahead is going to require the CPS board to be forthcoming about the situation we now find ourselves in at CPS. The time for putting politics over the needs of our students is over.