The Chicago Board of Education has approved a new policy that formally prioritizes transportation for students with disabilities and homeless students before other students. CEO Pedro Martinez said some families are being offered $500 monthly stipends to transport their children themselves. This is down from $1,000 offered last year.

An ordinance introduced by Ald. Brendan Reilly, who represents the Loop, the Magnificent Mile, River North and other Chicago areas hardest hit by property taxes thanks to their big commercial properties and expensive residences, simply states the inflationary property tax policy passed by Lightfoot as part of her 2021 budget “is hereby repealed in its entirety.”

The vote of confidence from Google, whose parent company Alphabet ranks No. 8 on the Fortune 500, follows recent decisions by Boeing, Caterpillar and Citadel to relocate their headquarters out of state. Pritzker has pushed back on criticism about those departures, pointing to other companies that have relocated to Chicago and Illinois. “If it wasn’t evident before, then surely it is crystal clear now: Google is one of Chicago’s most important companies,” said Pritzker, who state economic interest disclosures show is an Alphabet shareholder.

The program is part of the city’s $1.2 billion Chicago Recovery Plan to support local recovery from the social, economic and health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. This new team will allow the health department “to transition from emergency response to community health response, particularly…causes that contribute to Chicago’s racial life expectancy gap,” which has reached 10 years between Black and White Chicagoans, according to city officials.

CPS said an investigation uncovered several significant policy violations by the teachers, including safety policies concerning the transportation of students. But Board of Education members decided against terminating the two CPS teachers, as both were given a warning and will need to attend training.

“When I was chief in Riverside, one of our main goals (likely the same goal of every police chief), was to reduce crime. We would just try to push crime into another suburb so it did not happen in ours. That is what is happening now, but it is the city of Chicago that is desperately trying to push its crime west into the suburbs — and they are succeeding.”

“There was another question to ask, but they don’t dare ask it: Why would someone like me, who loved Chicago and loved it so much to move back into the city just as many of our friends were moving out, ever think about leaving the place I was born?”

CEO Pedro Martinez said there will not be a lot of changes to the district’s COVID-19 protocols from the end of the last school year. The district’s weekly, in-school testing program will continue, and take-home tests will be available to students as well.

The average cost to win a contested aldermanic race is $250,000, while a successful mayoral campaign can run upwards of $5 million, said Dick Simpson, a former alderman and a University of Illinois at Chicago political science professor.

Originally, the state planned to sell about 65% of the Thompson Center to JRTC Holdings for $70 million, but now will be selling the entire building for $105 million, and use those proceeds to buy the former BMO Harris Bank building at 115 S. LaSalle St. With Google eventually taking over 1.2 million square feet of space downtown, officials said it’s the biggest corporate expansion in the city’s history.

Home prices in the Chicago area were up 12.9% for the twelve months through May, which is about where it was the last two times the data was released. Again we are towards the bottom of the ranking of the 20 largest metro areas – third from the bottom this time. But at least we’ve had 13 consecutive months of double digit price increases.

“An investigation uncovered several significant policy violations by the teachers, including violation of safety policies concerning the transportation of students,” a CPS spokesperson said, including how one teacher offered incentives for students to attend protests far from the school without the district’s knowledge, “with unknown chaperones and without ensuring parental knowledge or permission.”

One of business owner Rashad Bailey’s chief complaints is that Black-owned businesses are treated differently in Chicago. And in all the wrong ways. Referring to the daylight murder of rapper FGB Duck as he walked out of a posh Gold Coast boutique two years ago, Bailey said, “He was in a f*cking store on Oak Street and they shot his *ss up! Is that the store’s problem? No!”