This November, Chicago will hold its first-ever Board of Education elections, just weeks after the entire board resigned in protest amid disagreements over budget issues.
The city is divided into 10 districts, each of which will elect one candidate to the nonpartisan 21-member board. Mayor Brandon Johnson will appoint the other 11 members for a two-year transition period. In 2026, the current districts will be split in half, and the full board will be filled with elected members, with the board president elected city-wide.
Hyde Park and Woodlawn are divided between Districts 6 and 10. District 6 covers the main quad and areas north and west of it, including the dorms on the north side of campus, while District 10 covers Hyde Park east of Woodlawn Avenue and areas south of the Midway, including International House and the south campus dorms.
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker signed a bill instituting the elected board in 2021 after a years-long campaign for the reform. Previously, the mayor appointed a seven-member board.
The school board shares authority over Chicago Public Schools (CPS) with the mayor’s office and the CPS chief executive. CPS also gets funding from the state government and negotiates contracts with the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU).
The current board members—all appointed by Johnson—resigned on October 4 after the mayor urged them to remove CPS CEO Pedro Martinez, according to reports by the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ. The mayor hopes to approve a short-term loan to help cover CPS’s budget deficit and pay for salary raises in a new CTU contract, but Martinez referred to the loan plan as fiscally irresponsible, leading to Johnson’s public call for Martinez’s resignation.
District 6
District 6 extends from 76th Street north to the Wicker Park area. Three candidates are on the ballot: former principal Jessica Biggs; Anusha Thotakura, the director of a progressive advocacy group; and Andre Smith, the founder of Chicago Against Violence.
Biggs, who was endorsed by the Chicago Tribune and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, served as principal of Burke Elementary School in Washington Park before she was controversially fired in 2018, with community members opposing her departure. In an interview with the Maroon, she said that her platform has four parts: equitable access, budget, staff and leadership pipelines, and community engagement.
“I believe I’m the only candidate in this race that has both the experience and the track record in schools around the neighborhood of the University of improvement, of authentic community engagement,” Biggs said. “I’m the only person in this race in District 6 who has a child in the system, so I have a clear stake in the success of the system.”
She opposes Johnson’s short-term loan to solve the budget crisis. “I don’t think that taking out a short-term, high-interest loan is in the best interests of all the students and families or the district or Chicago long-term,” Biggs said. “We’ve done this before, we’ve learned from it, and I think the saying is, ‘When you know better, you do better.’”
Biggs also said that she supports keeping Martinez in his position, citing stability. “I think it’s really important that [CPS] has [a] stable leadership and CEO through a major transition to an elected school board,” she said.
Thotakura is a former math teacher and high school debate coach. In an interview with the Maroon, she said she was concerned about inequities at CPS. “In a lot of schools in our city, we have under-resourced schools with crumbling building infrastructure and students that don’t have access to the same opportunities based on their own zip codes,” Thotakura said.
Thotakura, who was endorsed by the CTU, said that her top priority would be addressing the budget deficit. “Having a responsible budget that fully funds and resources our schools, closing the current budget deficit of over $600 million in a way that’s equitable and also sustainable, is the biggest challenge,” she said. “That’s why I’m running—because I think we need someone who can actually get sustainable funding for our kids.”
Smith did not respond to a request for comment.
District 10
District 10 covers a large portion of the South Side along the lakefront, stretching from near McCormick Place to the southern edge of the city. Four candidates are competing for the seat: former principal Adam Parrott-Sheffer; attorney and former teacher Karin Norington-Reaves; musician Che Smith, known professionally as Rhymefest; and pastor Robert Jones.
Parrott-Sheffer, who now serves on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, was the principal of Mary Gage Peterson Elementary School on the North Side and later worked for New York City’s public school system. “When we talk about deep knowledge of what our kids need to be successful—kids across the economic spectrum, kids across race and other identities—I bring a deep knowledge of how you help teams do that,” he told the Maroon. “At the other end of it, I’ve also done this work at scale. I have implemented policies that impacted 1.1 million students.”
He highlighted the budget as a top issue CPS is facing. “There was a $500 million dollar deficit just this year, and any budget shortfall that big is going to require both revenue and cuts to be at all realistic,” Parrot-Sheffer said. “There’s probably about 30 to 40 million in cuts we could make in terms of administrative functions if we’re willing to put more autonomy and accountability on our principles. We could probably get even more by closing network offices or things like that.”
Norington-Reaves, who was endorsed by the Chicago Tribune, was previously the executive director of the Chicago division of Teach For America and now serves as the CEO of i.c. stars, a workforce development nonprofit.
She told the Maroon that top issues for CPS included improving early childhood literacy and career and technical education. “Early childhood capacity to read is a big predictor of later success in life, high school completion rates, and, quite frankly, prison rates, and so we’ve got to have a greater emphasis on kindergarten through second grade literacy,” Norington-Reaves said. “And career and technical education is imperative: 40 percent of our CPS graduates one year after graduation are neither working nor in school, and we can remedy that by making sure that we have solid career/technical education beginning as early as sixth grade.”
Norington-Reaves also cited her past roles as good experience for dealing with CPS’s budget deficit. “I’ve had significant experience managing complex and very large budgets,” she said. “As CEO of the Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership, I managed a budget that started off as a $3 million cash advance on a $30 million budget and grew that to a $100 million budget. I raised philanthropic and corporate private sector funds to the tune of $150 million and created innovative projects and programs that impacted young people, particularly opportunity youth—young people between the ages of 18 and 25 who are out of school and out of work.”
Che Smith is a rapper and Grammy Award-winning songwriter known for his work with Kanye West. He ran unsuccessfully for a seat on the Chicago City Council in 2011 and was a Pritzker Fellow at UChicago’s Institute of Politics last year. He described his platform as focused on “BCP: budget, curriculum, personnel” in an interview with the Maroon.
“We must start with the budget,” he said. “Balance the budget. Use our community assets as surpluses and deliver our children and our facilities what they need to succeed. We see under-enrollment in many schools, buildings not being used. We see waste in our system. So, the budget must be a priority.”
Smith added that his background as a musician would provide a unique perspective that the board would benefit from. “I have a background as an artist…. I believe to have a dynamic school board, you need a diverse school board,” he said. “You need more than just one type of experience or qualification: You need artists. You need scientists. You need educators. You need people in finance. You need people that know how to build things. And you need artists.”
“We talk about how we’re tired of art programs being the first thing that’s cut from CPS. Why don’t we give artists seats at the table of creation in terms of policy?”
Jones, who was endorsed by the CTU, did not respond to a request for comment.
Many of the candidates emphasized the importance of voting in local elections, even for college students who might not be from the area. “Your property taxes in a couple of years, 50 percent of them are [going to] Chicago Public Schools,” Parrott-Sheffer said. “You are financially invested here, even if all you’re doing is buying a coffee, so you ought to have some say in where your money goes.”
“Even if you don’t feel a connection to Chicago, hopefully you feel a connection to the kids in your community that live in the University area and in the wider city,” Thotakura said.
Candidates from both districts universally decried the recent “chaos” in CPS management. “It’s unfortunate that the board resigned because in a crisis, you’re supposed to dig in,” Che Smith said. “That’s not how you protest. You protest by resolving the issues in a way that benefits the community.”
“What bothers me most about every single bit of these discussions is that nowhere is anyone centering what is best for our children,” Norington-Reaves said. “These political machinations are not about the work of the schools. They are about the business of politics, and honestly, I’m tired of it.”
Some also criticized large donations to some candidates in the school board election. “My hope is very much that having members of our communities be able to elect members to represent them and make decisions will help to democratize [the system],” Biggs said. “But we’re watching huge dollar amounts coming from Illinois charter schools, as well as the teachers union, and I think such high-dollar races are going to make it challenging for the original intention of the board to come to fruition.”
Many parents and family members of students at William H. Ray Elementary School in Hyde Park told the Maroon that they didn’t know a lot about the school board races. Some said they were worried about potential corruption and decline in schools under an elected board, while others expressed hopes that the board could function better.
“I’m probably going to vote for whoever the teachers union supports,” said Christine Kim, whose son is in third grade at Ray. “I think the teachers have been doing a great job trying to get resources for the school, and basically, I think they have our kids’ best interests at heart.”
