001President Harden, before you begin today's meeting, I would like to read a few announcements. Good morning. Welcome to the March 9th, 2026 special board meeting. Before we start the meeting, I would like to share a few safety points and next meeting announcements. Please note that the primary exit and entrance to the boardroom is the door which you use to enter this morning. If you are leaving the room, please use this door. The restrooms are outside of the boardroom doors to your left. During the meeting, we ask that you keep all aisles and exits clear. If you need any assistance during the meeting, please wave the attention of one of our security officers. Mark your calendars for the upcoming meeting. The next board meeting is scheduled for Thursday, March 19th, 2026 at 10:30 a.m. The board
002meeting will be held at 42 West Madison Street, Garden Level Boardroom. For details on how to register, register to speak or observe at the meetings and to learn about the speaker lottery process, please visit the Chicago Board of Education website at cpsboe.org. If you have any questions about registration or public participation, please contact the board office for assistance. Thank you for joining us today. President Harden, we are now ready for you to begin the meeting. >> Good morning everyone. Welcome to the Chicago Board of Education special meeting. Today is March 9th, 2026. I'm President Shan B. Harden on behalf of my fellow board members. Thank you for joining us today. We're holding today's special meeting in the boardroom at the CPS Loop office, 42 West Madison Street and Garden level. I'd like to note that
003board members and senior leadership are physically present in the boardroom. Registered speakers may join us person, in person, or virtually if they've opted to do so, and registered observers are joining us in person. Special board meeting of Monday, March 9th, 2026 is hereby called to order. Board secretary, please call the role. >> Member Bole, >> present. Member Wallace, >> present. >> Member Kuster, >> present. >> Member Poe, >> present. >> Member Rivas, >> present. >> Member Bannon, >> present. >> Member Biggs, >> present. >> Member Thorakura, >> present. >> Member Zachor, >> present. >> Member Deberry, >> present. President Harden >> present. >> We have 11 members present. We do have a quorum. I'd also like to recognize Dr. Maline King, interim superintendent chief executive officer and Elizabeth Barton, acting general counsel. >> The order
004of the meeting will be as follows. Pole participation followed by close session. We'll reconvene from co session and then adjourn. We'll proceed with today's pole participation session. Thank you for joining and share your comments with the board. in compliance with the Illinois Open Meetings Act, public participation, sometimes referred to as public comment, is a portion of the board meeting or hearing that grants district stakeholders the opportunity to address the board with their concerns and comments. Note that public participation is a time for the board and CPS senior leadership to listen and hear from you rather than a time for dialogue with board members during or after your remarks. And while we can't discuss personnel matters, public participation is a key component of transparent governance and it provides us as board members as well as senior
005leadership an opportunity to listen to everyone who has signed to speak. This board takes equity of voice seriously. And while we may not address your comments directly during public participation, CPS leadership is always present at our meetings and are able to address your concerns as follow-ups after the meeting. As a district and as a board, we also have many other spaces for authentic dialogue. For example, each and every one of our board members host board office hours so that you may have a conversation. So, please use our website cpsbboe.org if you want to meet with the board member during office hours. We encourage you to take advantage of the opportunity to meet with board members outside of a board meeting. And we thank you for your attention. As a reminder, union representatives will be allowed
0065 minutes to speak before public participation and any elected officials will be allowed five minutes to speak after the conclusion of public participation. Board Secretary, please share the rules of P participation. >> Thank you, President Harden. Members of the public who registered to speak were given the option to attend in person or via an electronic format. For those who prefer to attend via electronic format, they were given information to access this meeting by dialing a number and using their phone. We did this so that speakers with limited or no access to the internet or who may have weak internet connection could still participate using their phones. Also, members of the public may submit written comments for board of education meetings via the written comments form on the board's website at cpsbboe.org or mailed to 42
007Westmadison Street Garden level. Written comments received between the day the public agenda was posted through 5:00 p.m. the day after the board of education meeting will be submitted to the board and published within five business days on our website at cpsb.org. Speakers, please listen while I provide directions for public participation. I will call your name and number when it is your turn to speak. For speakers joining us virtually, as a reminder to unmute, please enter star six. Once you hear your name, please sh state your name for the record. I will then start the two-minute timer. When there are 30 seconds remaining, I will inform you so that you can proceed to conclude your remarks to allow for the next speaker to begin. For anyone standing with the speaker, note that in order to comply
008with the city's fire code, please stand along the glass partitions on the marked spots to keep aisles clear. Thank you. President Harden, um we will we have a union rep who would like to address the board. We'll begin with Caroline Rutherford, CTU Charter Division Vice Chair, who is here in person. Morning. CTU wants to keep you updated on the current situation at Aspira Charter Schools, which is nothing short of chaos. Last week, Aspira CEO Edgar Lopez once again told students, parents, and the public that CPS is lying about the mismanagement of his charter corporation, claiming the schools would remain open and that everything was just fine. Just hours later, he sent letters to all the staff at the schools notifying them that they would be laid off and the schools would be closed within weeks.
009He also sent CTU a notice of both high schools closure and we shared that with you immediately. and the CPS leadership. What is truly shocking is that CEO Lopez did not inform parents or students that what he had said was wrong or that he had made the decision to close their schools. Teachers were forced to inform students without any communication, support, or direction from the charter operator or from the school district. Students were crying, calling their parents and coping with massive confusion and stress with no clear path from Aspira or CPS on what would happen next. Parents scrambled quickly to pull their students from Aspira and enroll them in another school. Our understanding is that roughly about 15% of the students had already left in the 24 hours before CPS held their first community meeting.
010transferring with no information on which schools CPS were designated to welcome their students, no way to remain with their classmates, and every teacher they know and trust slated to be unemployed as they face this crisis. It was heartbreaking to watch this play out and especially since it was entirely predictable and we have been asking for months for a plan to be in place. Since then, CPS has held the community meeting and has taken some initial steps. Thank you, to prepare the students for the transition, but it doesn't go far enough. There are four receiving schools that have been identified. We've held meetings with members at these schools, but so much work has yet to be done to ensure no student is further harmed by the poor decisions of CEO Lopez and the Aspir management. So,
011here are two things that CPS must act on now. First, students from the senior class deserve to have all the celebrations and milestones that every senior has. CTU has offered to help host graduation events, but only you can make the arrangements for them to graduate together at the same school. We have proposals that could accomplish this, and we're willing to work with you all to ensure this for all 177 seniors. They deserve a prom, a senior class trip, a graduation ceremony, all of which should be working with the you should be working with the community to achieve. And as parents have expressed to us, remember that these events are not for CEO Lopez to try to repair his relation his image and his relationship or for the Aspira execs to improve their brand. They walked
012away from these students who deserve to celebrate all that they achieved over the last four years together. And second, students and teachers have built relationships and community together. A transition to a new school during the last quarter is not easy. The best way to ensure no student is lost in this transit transition is to have familiar, trusted adults in their new school, supporting them through the process. Additional teachers and staff will be needed at the receiving schools. So, it only makes sense for CPS to create an easy path for a spirit educators and students to transition together. This will allow for those relationships to continue, students to feel more confident in their new spaces, and it will keep some of the community together at such a difficult time. Shy arts. Wednesday is the next C
013uh CPS community meeting at Shy Arts and in preparation for that meeting we are asking CPS to come to the conversation with answers to the questions parents and staff have been sending you. These have all been sent via email as well. What are the estimated CPS budgets for the school with a limited school day and after school program CPS proposed versus maintaining the current successful program at the arts conservatory? Now, how much does CPS believe it would cost to build a successful arts high school with the conservatory program from scratch? What funding efforts have been considered by CPS? And what steps have been taken to bring on fundraising staff at CPS to raise money for all the arts and this school? Have you considered establishing a Friends of Shy Arts in place of the foundation?
014The Shy Arts students raised close to $40,000 during one week of a fundraiser. We have people that believe in our students. What remaining guard rails is CPS trying to solve for beyond what has been addressed in the proposal shared with you by CTU? And please be specific. Which policies are providing the hurdles to the 8 to 5:00 p.m. model? You've claimed that CPAA, CTU, and SEIU labor agreements also restrict preserving the shy arts model. So what elements specifically of those agreements and have they been raised with those unions? Is there a comprehensive four-year schedule that reflects the model that CPS proposed? We're looking for answers and we really need you all to provide them for us. Um, I also had the pleasure of seeing In the Heights, the musical at Shy Arts this weekend and
015those students and teachers and teaching artists did just such an amazing job. I really hope that some of you get the opportunity to go and see the kinds of productions and performances students are doing at the school. It's really It's really amazing. Thank you. >> Thank you for your comments, President Hardin. We are now ready to call speakers from the speakers list. Jessica Jessica Kieran, speaker number one. >> Good morning. I'm here yet again with more issues with our interim principal. Um when he began a little over a year ago, I was the chair of the LSC serving my third term in that role. He immediately in our first meeting one-on-one started pressuring me to give him a contract um without even conducting interviews saying let's get this process done as quickly as possible. Having
016just met the man I felt deeply uncomfortable with this and refused and this set off a pattern of retaliatory behavior against myself and my child who's a student there. Um since then I have refused to serve a fourth term as chair because it was so bad. So we are now in principal selection. We voted to begin that process last March. LSE relations did not do our training until the fall after months of complaints and escalation on my part trying to get that done. Um, we continue to be pressured to give him a contract without going through any steps, even interviews. We have already skipped some of the very first steps that we're supposed to take in that process per the district policy and LSC relations handbook. LSE relations is aware of the fact that we
017have not done this. So is the network chief. We continue to get pushed to vote for him and our new chair recently called a special meeting attempting to have a vote to do just that. Thankfully that measure failed. Um one of our parent reps is not a parent or guardian of a student there. Um they're the student that they used to have guardianship of no longer even resides in the state and currently attends school in Mississippi. >> You have 30 seconds remaining. Um, another member who is a teacher rep who has also been pressuring us to do this lost his election two years ago and his name was submitted to the board of ed as if he had won for approval to put him on instead of the person that won. Similar to the situation
018you guys just reviewed with Andrew Martin. I'm deeply deeply concerned that the network chief and that LSC relations continues to support this behavior as we navigate this process attempting to have integrity in the powers that are allowed to the LSC and belong to the community. >> Thank you for your comments. The next speaker is Avery Allen, speaker number two. Sorry. Okay. I'm a student at Foreman High School where over 80% of the student population is Hispanic. Recently, we had a walk out against ICE and I had met with our interim principal to talk about the plans where he said we had to go out the middle doors as to cause as little disruption as possible and that we had to be out by the start of the next period. Otherwise, the students in the halls
019would be hall swept. I'm not going to lie, at first I understood his point of view to respect teachers teaching time. But why was that the focus? So many teachers be proud of their students for making noise and standing up for what they believe in. We barely have a voice in the world. And all I wanted to do by organizing the walk out was to create a chance for people to get all that built-up fear and rage out and have a way to show what matters. This was the day we chose to speak our minds and be supported. But he tried to limit our constitutional rights. The next day, he came out with an email that stated, "Per district guidelines, our walkout should be 30 minutes or less." Which, to my knowledge, that guideline is
020actually up to principal discretion. So, does that mean Dr. Roberts feels that we only deserve to have our voices heard for 30 minutes? We spent over an hour walking outside with signs yelling at the top of our lungs to show what mattered to us. But does it matter to our interim principal? Does our safety not matter? Because that's what we protesting. Dr. Roberts once told me the only way he could actively help during a concern of ice outside the school is physically bring a student back in. So why not show that you're willing to do that instead of neglecting to inform us of ice presence just a block away? When asked to join the community members who would stand outside our school to watch out for ice, he said no and said that their presence
021was unnecessary and unwanted. He has shown on numerous occasions that our safety isn't truly his main concern. When a student made a threat to leave the school to come back with a gun with intent to use it, he chose to not go into lockdown. And it turned out that student ended up being arrested across the street >> 30 seconds remaining >> 2 minutes before dismissal. And he did in fact have a gun with him according to the police. It's not just about students either. When a staff member was so badly assaulted by a student that he had to be taken to the hospital, the student was back at the school the next day. Even though students have been getting suspended over the smallest things, that one didn't. My goal in our walk out, speaking at
022multiple LLC meetings, and being here in person during my school day is to speak to to speak is to show a matter to us because clearly for Dr. Roberts, it isn't us. Thank you. >> Thank you for your comments. The next speaker is Denedia Robinson, speaker number three. Good morning. My name is Denita Robinson Sanders, uh, president of the Shy North London Chamber of Commerce, fourth generation and stakeholder in North Londale. Uh, second, I am the graduate of Thomas Charmers Elementary and graduate of North Londale College Prep. North Londell is one of the highest tax communities and the least invested that holds the highest black community, the highest population of black students and black people. Parents and partnerships have become a distinct to it seems CPS and it's been replaced with politics. It seems as
023though that you guys have a fully elected school board coming up 2027 and yet you guys have avoided any type of relationship. But you played the game of shuffling meetings. I've reached out to you guys on several occasions and you guys have decided to schedule those meetings on board meetings and then occasionally you do these uh what are they uh popup meetings where you put four of us up here and you act like you're listening to us because it's a part of a lottery. Well, that will stand no more in our communities. We now have pure representation that will hold you guys accountable. We've seen no type of representation of you guys to come into a community that has been impoverished. Yet Martin Luther King is sitting on 16th Street and every single school along
02416th Street looks like crap. You guys sit here and you agree to tax our community and I am a taxpaying citizen who is fourth generation and I've not seen anything change in my community. But you've decided to strategically have relationships with politicians and not the people and not family. And what I will do is end on a prayer because that seems what this CPS school board needs. It's prayer and to put God back in the lives of our children so that they have omni omniresence of someone that they can go to at all times because it seems to not be the board that we can have access to. You have this down here downtown that is not convenient to anybody that looks like us in our community. End in prayer. Heavenly Father, watch over our
025children. Guide them learning them. Give them wisdom, protection, and opportunity. lead those who teach and serve them with the act of love, care, and purpose. In Jesus name we pray each and every day because you need it. Amen. >> Thank you for your comments. >> President Harden, this concludes public participation. >> We'll now move into executive session. Board member Lozano is not here. >> I I can take it. >> Board member Rivas, do you have a motion? MO1. >> I move for the passage of motion number MO1 and the commencement of a closed session to consider manners permitted under section 2C of the open meetings act subsection 1 and 16 as specified in the motion. >> Thank you sir. Is there a second? >> I second it. >> Thank you C with a roll call.
026Member Bole. >> Yes. >> Member Wallace I. >> Member Kuster. I >> member Pope. >> Yes. >> Member Rivas. >> Yes. >> Member Bannon. >> I >> member Bixs. >> Yes. >> Member Thodakura. >> Yes. >> Member Zachor. >> Yes. >> Member Derry. >> I. >> 10 eyes zero naz. This motion is adopted by the board. >> We'll now go into close session, executive session. >> Is there a motion to adjurnn? >> Motion. >> So move. >> Is there a second? >> Second. >> All in favor? I. >> We are journ. Thank you everyone.