Chicago Public Schools received about $10.1 million in federal pandemic aid to serve homeless students, as part of roughly $800 million distributed nationally to states and school districts. The city and school district created a program to give $500 stipends to families in Students in Temporary Living Situations, using money from the initial 2020 wave of federal COVID relief dollars. It’s not clear how many families received the money, and district officials deferred to the city, which administered the program.

The county’s paid time off policy matches state law, which took effect earlier this year, and slightly expands upon it; the board moved to expand covered employers to include park and school districts. Leaders from several suburban districts revolted, saying if leave benefits were extended to part-time workers, it would drive up costs and potentially lead to service cuts or fee hikes. The compromised January deadline for implementation gives districts more time to prepare for added costs and for county administrators to specify coverage requirements for districts that are split between different towns or other counties.

A spokesperson for Mayor Brandon Johnson said conversations were ongoing Thursday morning about whether the limits would be enforced. Communications Director Ronnie Reese declined to answer detailed questions about how many people are set to be evicted from the city’s 23 shelters.

Seventy Seven Communities Meal Service has already been paid $3.7 million to feed migrants, but could stand to make as much as $45 million. A second company, 14 Parish has received $3.8 million with the potential to make as much as $57.6 million. But former shelter residents can be seen outside the largest shelter in Chicago as they’ve created a make-shift business to provide an alternative for the food some are calling “horrible.”

The Chicago Department of Public Health said six adults and six children have been confirmed to have measles over the past week. Only two are unrelated to the migrant shelter Pilsen, which is the city’s largest. Meanwhile, a total of 98 migrants have been placed in quarantine for measles exposure at a Chicago-area hotel set up by the State of Illinois; 48 of them are children. They have all been exposed to measles and will stay in the hotel for 21 days.

Illinois’ population decline continued for its 10th consecutive year in 2023 as the state’s population dropped by 32,826 residents from July 2022-July 2023, but new data showed losses were in 87 of Illinois’ 102 counties. Population decline was the most pronounced in some of the state’s most populous counties, but most of the decline came from Cook County.

CTU demanded provisions related to affordable housing in past negotiations, but its recently leaked document makes clear its topline demand is not to help homeless Chicagoans, but to help Chicago teachers whose median salary is already more than $93,000. CTU’s bankrolling of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s campaign and his tax hike initiative is a gamble that could pay off big time.

“The Civic Federation has serious concerns about both the tax as proposed and the program it is intended to serve as currently articulated. … Our concerns focus on a lack of crucial information and analysis about the proposal, its implementation and its potential negative impact on the local economy.”

Though lauded as “groundbreaking” by the Park District, the playground has met with significant opposition from neighbors, who have faulted the choice of the Plaisance’s east end as too dangerous for a play space, while continuing to express frustration with the city’s handling of the fallout from its decision to cede public parkland to the Obama Center.

The city’s black residents created Reconstruction Era Reparation Act Now (ReRan) in 2023 because they were losing their homes due to rising property taxes, the group’s website states. “So what we want to do especially for the Black community because we’re very fragile, we want to keep them and preserve them here and by doing that, we can hold onto our culture in Chicago,” said ReRan Founder Howard Ray.

Mark Denzler, president of the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association, said that nationally more than 600,000 manufacturing jobs are unfilled, including an estimated tens of thousands in Illinois. Many of the openings would be suitable for newly arrived migrants or immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for years without legal permission, if they were authorized to work in the country, he said.

Using megaphones, wearing masks and carrying posters, dozens of anti-Israel protesters blocked the entry to Logan Theatre Monday night for the presentation hosted by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The protesters yelled “shame on you” to people attending a Jewish-sponsored event screening a documentary about the Hamas massacre of more than 300 people at the Nova Music Festival in Israel Oct. 7, 2023.

The Chicago area is home to the largest Palestinian and Palestinian American population in the country. State Rep. Abdelnasser Rashid, the only Palestinian American elected official in Illinois or Chicago government, said he’s among those who declined the meeting because “really there isn’t much more to be said. … There have been many meetings and conversations since October with the White House. And the reality is our position is extremely clear that there needs to be a permanent cease-fire and we need our country to stop providing arms to Israel.”

“I mean it’s a loss of income, really, because I have lost that opportunity,” said Chicago influencer Jen White after learning that the chamber had voted 352 to 65 in support of a measure that was designed to pressure TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest from the social media platform or face an effective ban in the United States.

‘Bring Chicago Home’ advocates claim there are 68,000 homeless Chicagoans, but that’s 10 times higher than the estimate recognized by the federal government. And Chicago Teachers Union President Stacey Davis Gates claims there are 20,000 unhoused students in the city, a subset of Bring Chicago Home’s 68,000 estimate – even as CTU’s new contract demands include taxpayer-funded housing assistance for teachers averaging nearly $100,000.

“(Mayor Brandon) Johnson claims his tax hike can bring in $100 million. But what happened in L.A.? High-end-property sales plummeted, and the tax failed to meet expected revenue. That’s the problem with taxation in general: Revenue estimates rarely pan out. Chicago’s new Bally’s Casino, for example, brought in less than a quarter of its projected tax revenue for 2023. There’s no guarantee that the estimated level of real-estate-tax money will come in, especially when relying on something as unstable as Chicago’s real-estate market.”

Andy Shaw: “Funding for the stadium, in Jerry’s shrewd, risk-averse business mind, would mirror the vehicle that helped build Soldier Field for the Bears and the current White Sox stadium at 35th and Shields in Bridgeport, now called Guaranteed Rate Field: Revenue from the city’s hotel-motel tax and the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority’s bonding power to raise the estimated $1 billion price tag for new stadium construction. … In other words, all public and no private dollars, and that’s the rub: $400 million in new tax revenue that wouldn’t be available for other pressing needs like education, health care, law

The Vintage 2023 estimates show Cook County remains the second largest county in the U.S. at nearly 5.1 million residents, but its population fell by more than 24,000 last year, the fourth largest decline among all counties. Chicago’s home county has lost more than 188,000 residents since the start of the pandemic in 2020, according to the census population estimates.

The large number of slayings would be unusual on a warm summer weekend and is startling for a late-winter weekday. The geographic reach of the violence is an “unfortunate reminder of the scale of resources and the continued focus that we need to muster as a city in order to have safe and healthy communities,” said Kim Smith, a director at the University of Chicago Crime Lab.

Andre Smith, vice president of the Where We Stand Right Now Washington Park Residents, called on Mayor Brandon Johnson “to run the city and not try to run the (School) Board. The (Chicago Teachers Union) has been in too many political elections and have not been teaching our children.”