Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Officer Pedro Martinez said he believes his dispute with Mayor Brandon Johnson “should have never escalated” to this level of public acrimony because he thinks their goals for the school system are aligned.
“I never picked this fight. I wanted things to deescalate,” Martinez said in a wide-ranging interview Wednesday. “This has never been about misalignment on vision. I always supported the mayor because he was the person that said, ‘We need to invest more in our schools.’ And I said, ‘Absolutely.’ And that has been my conversation with him from Day 1.”
But with funding still falling short, they disagree on how to proceed. The main source of friction is over whether to take out a short-term loan.
The mayor is pushing a type of borrowing known as tax anticipation notes, a way to access cash before tax revenue arrives.
Martinez is strongly opposed, saying it would carry high interest and hurt the school district’s already bad credit rating, which dropped after a round of borrowing in the last decade. Mayoral aides have said that was among several options presented to Martinez. The other options are not publicly known.
Martinez said he couldn’t, as an “ethical leader,” put the district further in debt .
“I have been working both ethically, with integrity, providing information, always with the attitude of ‘maybe they don’t understand the risk of borrowing.’”
The schools chief has instead asked for a record $462 million from special property tax districts to cover the entire expected deficit for this school year. Johnson said he would give as much as he could from those funds, but that amount could prove politically difficult with City Council members who rely on the money for development in their wards.
Martinez said the so-called tax increment financing dollars would help CPS take on a payment for non-teacher school staff in the municipal pension fund that Johnson has pushed onto CPS as well as land a Chicago Teachers Union contract.
He said he plans to push City Council members on the TIF issue at an Oct. 22 hearing as the city is entering budget season.
“I feel confident that our alders are reasonable and they care about our district and our city. By the way, they need this money as well. When they release a TIF surplus, 25 [percent] goes to the city. When we make this pension payment, it goes right back to the city.”
Some supporters of Martinez against Johnson in the past few weeks have suggested that CPS doesn’t need more funding. Martinez disagrees.
“This is where I am in line with both the mayor and our unions: The district is not fully resourced, and it has been under-resourced for decades. I mean, it was under-resourced when I was a student in the ’70s and ’80s,” Martinez said.
“We cannot let Springfield off the hook. They didn’t create this, they inherited it, just like all of us did. But we have to work together,” he said.
Both borrowing and TIFs would be one-time band-aids. That’s why the mayor and CPS say they are looking to Springfield for more long-term sustainable solutions.
The CTU blamed Martinez for not going downstate earlier in the spring to lobby for more funding for CPS.
Martinez on Wednesday said the city was too focused on other issues, like a few CPS-related bills on an elected school board, school cops and selective enrollment programs.
He added that officials from Gov. JB Pritzker’s office told Martinez and Board of Education President Jianan Shi in a “heated” meeting in May that CPS and the city didn’t appear aligned on funding as their top legislative goal.
The current strife doesn’t help CPS make its case. But Martinez said he’d like to go down earlier in the spring session and make funding the top priority.
In CTU negotiations, Martinez said there has been progress. But he said he wouldn’t agree to all of the union’s demands around staffing and other financial matters because “we cannot put the district in financial distress.”
Martinez said he had a good relationship with the Board of Education members who announced their resignations last week, and “only they can answer” why they resigned. He said he’s proud of their accomplishments together.
Martinez has said the mayor asked him to resign but he refused.
“I love this job, and my goal is to finish my contract,” he said.