The Chicago Teachers Union slammed Gov. JB Pritzker on Thursday for shutting the door on more state funding for cash-strapped Chicago Public Schools, deriding his thumbs-down as the “wrong answer.”
The two-term Democratic governor laid down a marker that the CPS path to balancing its budget wouldn’t be coming through Springfield anytime soon because of the state’s own financial strains, aggravated by federal funding cuts.
“What CTU and the mayor are talking about which is, you know, providing another billion or billion six for Chicago Public Schools, that’s just not going to happen,” Pritzker said Wednesday. “And it’s not because we shouldn’t. We should. We should try to find the money. But we don’t have those resources today. And we’re not going to see the resources from the federal government level either.”
At a South Side school Thursday, CTU President Stacy Davis Gates seized on the governor’s message of financial sparsity, asking incredulously whether Pritzker really meant to deny more state resources for CPS.
“We heard our governor say ‘no’ to paying what they owe to the schools like Fort Dearborn,” she told reporters outside Fort Dearborn Elementary School in the Brainerd neighborhood. “Because I am a teacher, I know that sometimes people have the wrong answer to the right question, and the wrong answer yesterday was ‘no.’
“I don’t think he means ‘no,’” she said of Pritzker. “I think he means we’re going to have to get together, create [a] coalition and put the pressure on billionaires to pay their fair share in this state.”
Davis Gates said CPS teachers have had to dip into their household budgets to bring toilet paper and paper towels to their classrooms to make up for resources missing from their school buildings because of “the failures of our governor and our super-majority Democratic Illinois General Assembly.”
“Ask him again today: Did he really mean ‘no’?” she said of the governor. “Ask him again: How can he refuse these beautiful Black children in this neighborhood the resources that they deserve? Ask him again if he’s serious about not paying his debt.”
The heated words come as CPS faces a pivotal moment. The school board will vote on the district’s budget next week, just a day before the legal deadline. Though district officials say it is a balanced budget, it depends on nearly $400 million being pulled from city special taxing districts called TIFs.
The majority of board members are nervous about counting on this money, noting that the mayor and City Council members could decide to provide far less. They want to put a possibility into the budget that they could take a loan if they don’t get this money to prevent having to make midyear cuts.
But more than that, Mayor Brandon Johnson and school board members say the state should step in and provide more funding for schools.
Their case was bolstered when the state released its annual calculations on how much it would take each school district to be able to provide an adequate education, as determined through a formula that looks at things like student-to-teacher ratios.
CPS was one of about 300 school districts that moved further away from having enough state money to provide an adequate education. CPS would need $1.574 billion more from the state.
At an event Wednesday in south suburban South Holland, Pritzker blamed President Donald Trump for the lack of extra money in the state treasury to help CPS confront its serious budgetary woes.
“Let’s start with the federal government, which has taken away education funding from schools all across the United States,” Pritzker said. “We are all having to deal with the onslaught of Donald Trump on education in this country, and I’m going to continue to stand up for and protect students across the state of Illinois.”
It was a tough budget year for Illinois. Earlier this year, the state was facing a projected $3.2 billion deficit for fiscal year 2026 — due to uncertainty over the federal government slashing funding to various state programs, as well as pandemic-era federal aid drying up.
In order to close the gap, Pritzker’s $55.2 billion budget included spending cuts to major programs, like health care for undocumented adults, as well as tax hikes on tobacco products and sports betting. Meanwhile, K-12 education saw a slight increase in its spending line from the previous fiscal year’s budget.
“More needs to be done,” said Pritzker, who intends to seek a third term in next year’s gubernatorial election. “Frankly, it’s one reason why you need to elect great people to public office who actually care about pre-K to 12 education.”