“It’s important to understand where he came from, because the mayoralty hasn’t changed him. He’s changed the mayoralty. (Brandon) Johnson is not a politician. He’s still that hip young teacher and radical union organizer, and he’s running the city with that point of view.”

“To blame everything from slavery to the second coming of Jesus as to why he has the authority and is offended by anyone questioning that is remarkable to me,” Ald. Ray Lopez said. The mayor said previously, “They said that it would be fiscally irresponsible for this country to liberate Black people,” the mayor said, “and now, you have detractors making the same argument of the Confederacy when it comes to public education in this system.”

In Fiscal Year 2022, instructional and operational spending per student came in at $15,274 and $24,132, respectively. In FY2018, those figures were $10,314 and $15,878, representing increases of 48 percent and 52 percent.

John Roberson, chief operating officer of the City of Chicago: “One option being considered is the possibility of headquartering our Chicago Police Department air fleet at Midway Airport, as the city currently stores police helicopters at an airport in Indiana. Moving the helicopters to Midway Airport would shorten response times and save tax dollars for decades to come — a significant step as the City of Chicago faces a nearly $1 billion budget deficit and any development must be assessed in that context.

The six board nominees announced Monday are Olga Bautista, co-executive director of the Southeast Environmental Task Force; Michilla Blaise, chief of staff to Cook County Commissioner Frank J. Aguilar; Mary Gardner, a prominent West Side organizer; Rev. Mitchell L. Ikenna Johnson, CEO of My Community Plan Foundation; Deborah Pope, a retired CPS teacher; and Frank Niles Thomas, former 21st Ward superintendent. The Mayor’s Office initially announced Friday that seven members would be nominated Monday.

Multiple groups vocally opposed to Mayor Brandon Johnson’s actions disrupted the mayor’s opening statement on multiple occasions, with a grouping holding “Fire Johnson” signs and chanting “not legit” during his remarks. Johnson pushed back against those criticisms, pointing to his activism on behalf of the city’s schools before he was elected mayor in 2023. “The most legitimate existence of anyone in this country is the existence of a Black mayor,” he said.

Members who are full-time employees of Chicago Public Schools pay over $1,400 in dues, but less than $149 of that was devoted to representing Chicago teachers. The rest was spent on administration, politics and other union leadership priorities.

“It would be one thing if those extra staffers would help the district’s poor academic performance, but the number of regular classroom teachers barely changed in that time. The growth in administrators, assistant principals, social workers and other support staff far outpacing the stagnant number of teachers.”

The mayor said, “… (T)he people who are upset with me right now, as we shepherd and transition into this transformational moment … are the same people that watch Black women cry when their jobs were were being taken away from them, and then blame those Black women for the conditions in which Black children were being raised in abject poverty — [and] many of them are tied to administrations that not only closed schools and privatized assets, but shut down public housing, took the dedicated string for pensions and gave it to greedy corporate interests, spent all the money,

The park surrounding the center will offer play areas, walking paths, and a sledding hill, all connected by a long pedestrian promenade that joins the center to Jackson Park and runs alongside its beautiful and historic lagoons. The facility is expected to open in 2026.

In other countries, this would be a crisis of corrupt governance. In Chicago it’s the CTU monopoly at work.

“It’s hard to understand how the supporters of this legislation think. They seem to believe restricting housing supply will somehow make housing more affordable. They bemoan disinvestment in their communities while making it increasingly difficult for investment to happen. They seem to regard those who have the means to help them solve the city’s problems as the enemy, rather than as partners. And with that kind of thinking, we all lose.”

“What appears to have happened instead is that board members, to put it bluntly, behaved like cowards, deliberately keeping hidden any differences of opinion among members. Left abandoned for now are Chicago’s CPS parents, many of whom are bewildered at the chaos and worried about who’s calling the shots on their children’s education. That’s unacceptable.”

The year filled with deeply personal fights has changed the council, Ald. Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez said. There is a deep pool of “vindictive energy” and ever-clearer fractures in the City Council that were present, but harder to see before, she said. “It has definitely added tension,” she said of the Gaza debates. “It is now more than ever in the open, the huge ideological divide in the council.”

A 27-year-old man was shot in the back and seriously injured around 5:15 a.m. Sunday near 49th Ward Ald. Maria Hadden’s office.