Lightfoot names new school board

The new Chicago Board of Education that will hold down the fort until an elected board is seated will change the way it does business — in public, instead of behind closed doors, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Monday.

“The days where everything was done in executive session and then, they come out and take a vote — that’s over,” Lightfoot told a news conference at Lionel Hampton Fine & Performing Arts School, 3434 W. 77th St.

“The majority of the work the school board does is gonna have to be in public. … Every single one of the members we’re proposing understands that transparency is the cornerstone of legitimacy. You can’t have legitimacy when you do everything in secret.”

In the past, the board also has put hurdles in place of people wishing to attend or speak at board meetings, including advance online registration, and being asked for your name, phone number and whether you were a CPS parent.

Asked later Monday about that process, and whether greater transparency also meant more board meetings would be at night so more parents could attend, a Lightfoot spokesman responded that the mayor’s office, CPS and the board “continue to explore options to make Board Meetings more accessible for all stakeholders, including students, parents, teachers, staff and community members.”

Lightfoot said the mayor needs to “have skin in the game.” But, she anticipates a “collaborative relationship — not a dictatorship” with the new board.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported last week that former City Clerk and mayoral challenge Miguel del Valle was Lightfoot’s choice to serve as school board president.

On Monday, the new mayor made it official and surrounded del Valle with her picks for the six other board seats, as well as a deputy mayor for education — all of them “super-stars” in their own right, she said.

They include three parents of Chicago Public Schools students and two people, including del Valle, with grandchildren attending CPS.

“I don’t want a rubber stamp. Nobody wants a rubber stamp that undermines legitimacy. They are there to ask tough questions. To challenge Dr. [Janice] Jackson [CEO of CPS] and her team … to really improve the quality of the classroom experience for our children all over the city with a lens of equity and inclusion and making sure particularly neighborhood school like this one get the kind of resources they need,” Lightfoot said.

Even before introducing the new board, Lightfoot praised Jackson to the hilt and announced that Jackson, former Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s fifth try at schools CEO, would be on “for the long-term.”

“There’s not a question that you can ask Dr. Jackson about CPS that she doesn’t know and can back up with data. I’m gonna try to stump you at some point,” the mayor said.

“I get people stopping me, people calling me, emailing me at all levels of CPS talking about how enthusiastic they are about her leadership. It’s not just folks at the higher levels. ... It’s teachers, principals and parents who are really enthusiastic and hopeful about the kind of leadership that Dr. Jackson has brought to CPS. ... I’m looking forward to her continued leadership.”

Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times

Del Valle said his immediate priorities are to: strengthen neighborhood schools while continuing to support the work of selective enrollment and charter schools; expand vocational and early childhood education and reduce, what he called the “chronic truancy rate.”

How exactly does he plan to confront the intransigent truancy problem?

“Probably the most important component of that is the parents — the families. ... You do it through incentives, through encouragement, through monitoring, through timely communication with parents, through follow-up, through providing the wrap-around services,” del Valle said.

“That’s why I’m so excited about ... combining education and human services. ... It’s about the community school model ... you engage the parents after school and on weekends. You connect the parent more to the school, which then allows you to challenge parents to pay more attention to those issues.”

The former chairman of the Illinois Senate Education Committee also promised to confront the issue of per-pupil budgeting.

“You have declining enrollment in some schools — and the money follows the child. There were a lot of folks who fought for that. And even back then when it was proposed I anticipated that there would be some schools that would have difficulty with that. These are the kinds of things the new board will be looking at,” he said.

The new board will remain in place until an elected board is seated. Lightfoot campaigned in support of an elected school board. But, at her request, Senate President John Cullerton put a brick on a bill creating a 21-member elected board she viewed as unwieldy.

That gave the Chicago Teachers Union an opening to pounce.

“CPS continues to be plagued by the chronic lack of transparency, accountability and democracy that underpins mayoral control — and it’s time for the mayor to keep her campaign promise for an elected, representative school board,” CTU President Jesse Sharkey was quoted as saying in a statement.

Sharkey said Lightfoot had the chance to deliver on her campaign promise during an “historic legislative session.”

“She refused, instead doing what Rahm Emanuel did for eight years: pushing Senate President Cullerton to derail that legislation while refusing to engage with the very grassroots forces that have been fighting for this most democratic right,” Sharkey said.

Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times

The board members announced Monday by Lightfoot:

• Sendhil Revuluri, board vice president, is a Chicago native and and former parent member of the Local School Council of Suder Montessori Magnet Elementary School. He also worked in the CPS Office of High School Teaching and Learning. He is managing director of strategic investment at PEAK6 Capital Management, a Chicago options trading firm.
• Dwayne Truss is a former 29^th Ward aldermanic candidate and local school council member who served as a board member for the education advocacy group Raise Your Hand.
• Amy Rome is a former teacher and former principal at the National Teachers Academy, the top-performing school that Emanuel wanted to close to make way for a high school at the South Loop site.
• Elizabeth Todd-Breland, a history professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago Public Schools parent and member of the Local School Council at a Kenwood CPS school. Todd-Breland also is the author of “A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s,” published in 2018.
• Lucino Sotelo, a Chicago Public Schools graduate and parent of two CPS students. He is now chief marketing officer for KemperSports Management and previously served as an executive board member for City Year Chicago.
• Luisiana Melendez, a professor at the Erikson Institute early childhood teacher training center. A recent Erikson report highlighted gaps in early education.