New CPS CEO Greeted By Looming Deficit, Frustrated Parents

On the day she was officially introduced to the school board as the new Chicago Public Schools chief executive officer, Barbara Byrd-Bennett was greeted by a crowd of parents upset over school closings, and a $1 billion deficit waiting for her a year down the road.

“I hear you. It’s been a week,” Byrd-Bennett said to one frustrated parent during the last Chicago Board of Education meeting on Oct. 24.

After board President David Vitale introduced her, Byrd-Bennett pledged to “build trust” with CPS parents and encourage “a more meaningful dialogue” with community members. She also extended an olive branch to district teachers in the wake of contentious negotiations over the new contract agreed upon last month.

“I am a teacher who happens to be the CEO. At the core I continue to be a teacher,” she said.

Byrd-Bennett was appointed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel earlier this month to replace Jean-Claude Brizard, who was criticized for his hands-off approach during the labor negotiations. She is the fourth Chicago Schools CEO in less than two years.

After a warm welcome from the board, Byrd-Bennett got right down to business, starting with a grim new budget from Chief Administrative Officer Tim Cawley.

A revised 2013 budget was necessary to accommodate the $103 million in salary added by a new contract with the teachers union.

“We will cover this through increased revenue and some cuts,” Cawley said. “Our key priority was to keep these changes away from the classroom.”

To do that the new budget relies on $70 million in additional revenue from property sales, restructuring debt and capitalization of interest. Cawley said that means delaying debt repayment and relying on one-time sources of revenue to make up the gap.

Combined with pension payments coming due, the net result is a $1 billion deficit for the next fiscal year’s budget, 2014, which Cawley said will pose “significant challenges.”

“To say the 2014 budget poses significant challenges is the understatement of the year,” said board member Henry Bienen. “You haven’t saved anything. It is just changing the date. We haven’t addressed the problems in the CPS budget.”

Parents and activists at the meeting worried that part of addressing those problems would involve more school closings, and mentioned the possible closings of up to 100 Chicago public schools.

Chicago Teachers Union member Marty Ritter pointed to a full-page ad in the Chicago Sun-Times from a private school that begins with the line “neighborhood schools closing?” He decried the lack of information available to parents and teachers and called for more communication from the school board.

The district must release a list of proposed school closings by Dec. 1, 2012.

Byrd-Bennett promised greater transparency with CPS parents, but Camille Mathis, a member of the Mollison Elementary School Local School Council, 4415 S. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, said she did not believe it.

“[The decision making] is happening behind closed doors,” she said.

Mathis was at the meeting with a group of about 10 parents to protest the closing of Walter H. Dyett High School, 555 E. 51st St., which is in the first year of a three-year phase out.

The board was not able to vote on the revised budget because the school district missed a deadline for advertising two required public hearings; they plan to vote on it at next month’s meeting on Nov. 14.