Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office says he will announce seven new appointments to replace the outgoing members on Monday. “I really believe that they’re going to try and appoint a rubber-stamp board of his CTU colleagues and friends in order to give CTU everything they want before this board takes effect,” Ald. Anthony Beale said.

“When the state of Illinois can fund genocide, ask why the state of Illinois cannot fund the public schools,” said Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez, one of several speakers to address the crowd. “We have plenty of resources to fund the transportation of kids with disabilities. They say there’s no money for that, but there’s money for genocide.”

Tax bills in the southern suburbs came in with a median increase of almost 20 percent last year, the largest hike in three decades, Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas found. In several majority-Black suburbs, including Harvey, tax bills increased 30 percent. “The south suburbs are the poster child for inequitable property taxation in Illinois, and now it’s worse than ever for homeowners,” she told the outlet last month.

Late Friday, some community leaders and elected officials called on Gov. JB Pritzker to intervene in what they call a CPS crisis. The governor’s office said he does not have the legal authority to do so.

“It is, by my lens and by the lens of most experienced hands going back a couple generations now, possibly the most challenging moment for the city,” said Joe Ferguson, president of the fiscal watchdog Civic Federation. “Not to downplay the challenge of the Great Recession, but we have fewer options now than we had then. And this is an enormous deficit, a deficit that is in the range of the COVID deficits, without the benefit of any white knights.”

At least three dozen aldermen, including numerous allies of Mayor Brandon Johnson, posted an open letter Saturday blasting the mayor’s handing of Chicago Public Schools. “A School Board full of lame-duck appointees carrying out only a few months of a term before residents get a chance to elect representatives is not what is in our best interest,” the letter said.

“As Ald. Scott rightly said during the last City Council debate before ShotSpotter went away, ‘You can’t put a life over a campaign promise.’ There was ample room for Johnson to pivot, given the compelling information we have now on ShotSpotter’s benefits that wasn’t available during the campaign.”

The 2024 street race weekend drew 53,063 unique visitors, up 12 percent over last year, with more than half of attendees traveling to Chicago for the event. Total attendance, however, fell 5.5 percent to about 75,000 racegoers, the study from Temple University’s Sport Industry Research Center found. The out-of-town attendees spent about $568 per day in Chicago and booked 33,268 hotel room nights.

Officials are beefing up security at Alcott High School after a gang-related shooting left a 15-year-old boy injured at Hamlin Park Friday afternoon. The shooting, a source said, is part of escalating tensions between the Maniac Latin Disciples and Insane Deuces street gangs.

A jury found Thompson guilty in February 2022 of two counts of lying to regulators and five counts of filing false income tax returns. But now, Thompson will be at the center of Supreme Court arguments over whether the law used to convict him of lying “prohibits making a statement that is misleading but not false.”