The unanimous vote taken at the CTU’s house of delegates meeting Wednesday evening sets the table for a Sept. 26 vote which will decide whether members authorize the union to strike.

The earliest the union would go on strike is Oct. 7.

More than 16,450 Chicago Public Schools students were homeless last year, half of them concentrated in ten South and West Side wards, underscoring the need for a “dedicated revenue stream” to combat the problem.

He also says, “There are 115,000 self-admitted adult street gang members in the city of Chicago,” he said. “That doesn’t include the juveniles. That is major challenge for law enforcement and society, and we’re not going to police our way out of it.”

S&P said it expects that the city “will continue a trend of using surplus tax-increment financing district revenues to plug the budget gap,” but the agency sees that revenue source as “unpredictable and therefore one-time in nature.”

“It doesn’t have to be this way.”

The free program through Chicago Public Schools could come at a major cost to community-based early childhood centers, many of which offer far more than preschool for four-year-olds, including infant and toddler care as well as after school and summer programming. The preschool expansion, coupled with new requirements for centers that receive public funding, is hurting centers across the city, including Concordia Place in the Avondale neighborhood on the North Side.