CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) - Kids in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) are still on winter break, but CEO Pedro Martinez says progress is being made in contract talks with the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU).
They're now waiting for CTU to sign off on verbal agreements, paving the way to tackle 160 demands, which is down from over 700 proposals.
The CTU has had a months-long standoff with CPS. Working without a contract, they’re demanding more staff and nine percent raises for four years, among other things.
Amid the tension, CTU President Stacy Davis Gates Friday gave CPS CEO Pedro Martinez a nickname, "supreme being.” It highlights the power granted to Martinez by a judge who stepped in late last month after Mayor Brandon Johnson, a CTU member whose listed as being "on leave,” used his soon-to-expire mayoral power to put together a school board that voted to fire Martinez.
“The supreme being keeps talking about all the proposals,” Davis Gates told reporters. “Can I tell you what all of those proposals represent and can I tell you what we’ve told them about all those proposals?
“We told them that all of those proposals represent the great dissatisfaction that many of our members, paraprofessionals, clerks, teachers assistants, have in their school communities.”
She has said the CPS CEO is purposely slowing negotiations to wait until Chicago has a partially elected school board this month.
Martinez, a CPS graduate himself from the Near Southwest Side, pushed back and said he’s grappling with a budget deficit and declining enrollment.
“I hear a lot of narratives out there, but, please, I invite you to go to our schools in the poorest communities. They have the smallest class sizes. They have more people in their buildings than ever before and, many of them, with even less children than they had in 2019,” Martinez said Friday.
Martinez said they have verbal agreements on many key issues and are now waiting for the CTU to sign off to make them official.
One major sticking point is teacher pay. Instead of the nine percent raises as the CTU requested, Martinez stated they’ve agreed verbally on four percent cost of living adjustments. He emphasized that this would still make Chicago teachers among the highest-paid in urban districts, with a few exceptions like New York City. He also clarified that the four percent increase does not include step raises for years of service.
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