Classes canceled for more than 350,000 students in Chicago as nearly 30,000 Teachers & Support Staff of Chicago public school teachers went on strike after contract negotiations with city officials took a turn for the worse.
They demand for better pay and benefits, smaller class sizes and more nurses, counselors, social workers and librarians and more school funding.
As teachers and support staff didn’t show up for work Thursday has brought the country’s third-largest school system to a standstill. The union said teachers don’t plan on going back into classrooms until a fair deal is struck.
“We mean business,” Stacey Davis Gates, vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union, told reporters on Thursday. “It cannot be about politics and personalities. It’s got to be about shifting and transforming the infrastructure of inequity.”
“CTU has told us they will continue their strike, which means classes will not be in session tomorrow, 10/18,” the Chicago Public School District said.
City officials say the teachers’ demands are too extreme and too expensive for the school district’s $7.7 billion budget. And they would rather deal with some of the city’s most pressing issues outside of the bargaining process with teachers. They’ve agreed to give teachers a 16 percent pay raise over five years and increase staff at school. Their offer doesn’t go nearly as far as the teachers want it to.
“We have tried to provide the best deal that’s fiscally responsible, fair to teachers, and fair to taxpayers,” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said in a press conference Wednesday, calling it the best offer in the teachers union’s history.
>Juthy Saha
