Sixty-one-year-old Kimberly Penson gets on the bus by 4:45 a.m. so she can make eggs, bagels or biscuits before the first bell rings for the elementary students she calls “her babies.”
And then, as the sole cook at her school, she turns to preparing lunch, barely sitting down until she leaves at 3 p.m.
Penson is part of the fabric of Greene Elementary School in Bridgeport. When former students see her out and about they often exclaim, “Oh, hey, Miss Kim!”
“They jump out of their cars and they hug me,” she says. “I think that’s wonderful because they recognize who I am and what I did for them.”
But Penson, who has worked for Chicago Public Schools for 21 years and makes an annual salary of about $34,000, says she feels deeply disrespected by the school district’s leadership. She and her colleagues, who are represented by the union Unite Here Local 1, have been working to negotiate a contract for more than 11 months.
To “sound the alarm” on what they see as unfair and unequal wages, they are holding a protest Thursday afternoon at which several lunchroom workers plan to sit down and block traffic on a street downtown as an act of civil disobedience.
The two biggest sticking points, according to Unite Here: Wages and staffing levels.
On Wednesday, a CPS spokesperson said both sides agreed earlier this month to call in a federal mediator. They are typically called in when talks have stalled and to prevent a strike.
“CPS remains committed to reaching a fair and sustainable agreement,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement. “A neutral third party will help ensure that negotiations proceed productively. CPS looks forward to working with the mediator to resolve outstanding issues in the best interest of our employees and the students we serve.”
Lunchroom workers, including cooks, porters who clean kitchens and attendants who serve food, are among the lowest paid full-time workers in the school district. Their average salaries range from about $23,400 to $37,400, according to CPS’ employee roster from last month. Federal poverty levels range from $15,960 for individuals to $33,000 for a family of four in 2026.
Patrick Griffin, organizing director for Unite Here, says its workers should be paid on par with other similarly situated workers in CPS who are represented by other unions.
In the latest CTU contract, the minimum earnings for paraprofessionals, who work with students with disabilities, teachers assistants and other support staff were raised to $40,000. All full-time SEIU-73 members, which include security staff and special education teacher aides, earn a baseline salary of $40,000, according to their latest contract. Unite Here is asking for a similar raise for lunchroom workers.
“We think that people should be treated equally,” Griffin said. “The people who work in the lunchrooms, their wages are so far behind everybody else.”
But CPS has so far refused to agree to that minimum for lunchroom workers. The cash-strapped district is projecting at least a $520 million deficit for the upcoming school year, and has tried to avoid taking on additional costs.
At the same time, CPS has steadily decreased the number of lunchroom workers. CPS has 20% fewer lunchroom attendants, cooks and porters currently on staff compared to five years ago, according to a WBEZ analysis. That amounts to 324 fewer positions,187 of which were lost in the last year.
Griffin says a lot of school cafeterias only have one or two workers, which means that if one person is out, the other has to rush to cook, hand out food and clean up solo.
“It’s extremely stressful,” he says.
Union representatives have urged the district to sign a new contract at school board meetings in recent months, highlighting the financial stress lunchroom workers are under.
At a meeting in February, Roushaunda Williams, who sits on the executive board for Unite Here, said she’d seen how her sister-in-law, a CPS lunchroom worker for more than 26 years, had struggled.
“Her heart is big, she loves the kids, but she’s seldomly validated,” Williams said.
In a survey conducted by the union last year, 88% of lunchroom workers who responded reported having trouble paying for necessities such as food, housing, electricity, child care or medical needs in recent months, Williams noted.
“They can’t afford food,” Williams said. “Every day the board fails to settle a fair contract is another day that CPS lunchroom workers struggle to feed their families.”
CPS officials have said they are focused on delivering higher wages for workers. District officials told school board members in February they had proposed increases so no worker earns less than $20 dollars an hour by this August. That’s more than the city’s current $16.60 minimum wage and would translate to $41,600 a year for full-time workers.
Unite Here officials say that CPS’ most recent proposal would bring pay up to $19 an hour for the 2026-27 school year. The starting wage for lunchroom attendants now is $16.78 an hour, and the union has said the vast majority of lunchroom workers make less than $18.42 an hour.
Lunchroom workers are hourly workers who do not get paid during the summer or winter breaks or on holidays. Unite Here officials say they’d need to be paid $24.63 an hour to approach $40,000 per year.
Griffin said CPS’ proposals “don’t get our members out of poverty” and the two sides are still “far apart” on wages.
In Penson’s cafeteria, they had an additional lunchroom attendant five years ago. Without that help, Penson says the strenuous work has become even more so. Her right foot recently became inflamed from the many hours she spends standing on the concrete floor and she now has to do physical therapy twice a week.
The doctor told Penson to get specific shoes. But she says they are expensive and she wants to give any extra money she has to her grandchildren. Just this week, she says, she helped them pay for a field trip.
The rent in her Englewood apartment keeps increasing, but her salary isn’t keeping up. At times, she says she has so little food in her own kitchen that she goes to her mother’s or her sister’s just to get a meal.
Her eyes light up at the prospect of getting paid $40,000 a year. It would be an almost 18% raise.
“That would be big,” she says. “I can do for my grandkids.”