Charter teacher strike looks at 2nd week; talks continuing
city charter school strike that has halted regular classes for 2,000 students at four campuses prepared to enter its second week on Sunday, as negotiators grappled over pay and the Chicago Teachers Union planned “stepped-up militancy on the picket line.”
Chicago International Charter School pickets and union allies rallied at the CTU’s headquarters over the weekend for a show of labor force, capping a week of picketing and negotiations that failed to land an agreement to end Chicago’s second work stoppage at its independently operated campuses.
“We know that we are working within a broken system,” said Jen Conant, who chairs a bargaining unit that represents four CICS campuses, during a Saturday rally. “We know that CICS and management value the money and their own greed over the students’ needs.”
The roughly 175 CTUrepresented educators at Wrightwood Elementary School, Ellison High School, Northtown Academy High School and ChicagoQuest High School have been bargaining for months with Civitas Education Partners, which manages those four CICS campuses.
Both the union and management acknowledge that CICS has offered pay raises and cost-of-living adjustments in each year of a potential four-year deal, though they offer divergent characterizations of how big those salary increases would be and whether they would bring teachers and classroom assistants on par with colleagues in traditional Chicago Public Schools.
There are also tangles over cuts to the length of the educators’ workday and the number of days they work each year, CICS said Friday, plus disputes over whether to assign a maximum of 28 or 29 students in each classroom.
But, a CICS spokeswoman said, “compensation continues to be the major holdA out.”
“This is a fight for the soul of what we’re going to be in public education,” Illinois Federation of Teachers President Dan Montgomery said during Saturday’s event at CTU headquarters.
Union officials, citing CICS financial records, have concluded that the charter organization holds roughly $36 million in budget reserves that could help finance a contract agreement. CICS has contended its reserves are half that amount and said that meeting the union’s latest pay demands would “lead to financial insolvency.”
Negotiations were scheduled to continue Sunday.