CHICAGO (AP) – A weekend of inconclusive contract talks meant that negotiators for the Chicago Teachers Union and Chicago Public Schools met again Monday in a bid to avert a threatened teachers’ strike, with an announcement expected before a midnight deadline on whether teachers would form picket lines in the nation’s third largest public school district.
Parents rallied in support of teachers outside Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s home on Monday morning, and another pro-educator rally was planned for later in the day. The union also asked teachers to pick up placards and other strike materials at headquarters.
Teachers are prepared to walk off the job as early as Tuesday morning, the CTU said. All 652 schools will be open during normal school hours for the district’s 400,000 students, CPS said.
The union wants no cuts to salary or benefits and an additional $200 million – or $500 per student – in spending to ensure adequate staffing and “to accommodate the needs of our children,” CTU President Karen Lewis said. CPS has said it is working within the framework of a January offer, which included pay increases and a cap on privately operated charter schools. The union turned it down in February.
About two-dozen people with Parents 4 Teachers rallied across the street from Emanuel’s home in the leafy Ravenswood neighborhood on the city’s North Side. Several children, off school due to Columbus Day, also attended; one held a placard that read, “Parents, Teachers, Students – United.”
One of the organizers, Erica Hade, has several children in the Chicago public school system and lives across the street from one school. She said she sees teachers arriving for work at 6 a.m. and leaving 12 hours later.
“How can parents not be supportive of teachers?” she said.
Organizers also went door to door handing out cards that listed issues they saw as critical, such as enforceable class-size limits, a moratorium on charter-schools expansion and no cuts to teachers’ pay.
One theme struck by several at the rally was the perception that Emanuel focuses inordinately on wooing businesses to Chicago. At one point, protesters chanted, “Mayor Emanuel, we’re no fools. If there’s money for developers, there’s money for schools.”
One Ravenswood resident, Jim Tormey, a 52-year-old father of two children who attend city schools, spoke with protesters. Afterward, he said he had some sympathy for teachers but that his feelings were also mixed.
“There are ebbs and flows in that sympathy,” he said. “We love our teachers, but we want our kids not to miss school because of a strike.”
If there is a strike, it would be the second major one since 2012, when teachers were out for seven school days.