A former teacher and principal who currently works in the mayor’s office will serve as the interim leader of Chicago Public Schools as it faces a $529 million budget deficit and no clear path for solving it.
Macquline King, the senior director of educational policy in the mayor’s office, will take over for terminated CEO Pedro Martinez whose last day is next week.
King barely received the majority needed to be appointed. She received support from all but one of the members appointed by or aligned with Mayor Brandon Johnson. Eleven of the 20 voting members approved her as interim CEO, one abstained and nine voted no, including elected board member Yesenia Lopez who is usually aligned with the mayor. The president of the board does not have a vote.
“I definitely don’t perceive that this will be easy,” she said in an interview Wednesday. “Ultimately, what’s most important to me is making sure we minimize the impact [of the budget deficit] at the school level.”
King said her experience in the mayor’s office and working with the city council’s education committee will help her navigate the budget situation. She said she’s hoping the mayor’s office and city council members can help find pathways to deal with the deficit. King said she plans to keep parents fully informed over the summer so there are no shocks when school starts back up in August.
Like Martinez and former CEO Janice Jackson before him, King and her children are alumni of CPS, she said.
The search for a permanent CEO is ongoing. The Chicago Board of Education has been holding meetings across the city to solicit input from parents and families and the district has started accepting applications.
King will lead the school district through a tumultuous time that will come to a head almost immediately. The school system’s deficit could be even larger than the $529 million deficit, and that doesn’t include a $175 million municipal pension payment that the mayor wants CPS to cover.
The school board president, some board members and the principals association have bashed Martinez for failing to present a spending plan that fully addresses the deficit. His administration assumes that the school district will get $300 million from the state or city, though neither have any plans to provide CPS with that extra money.
In private meetings with small groups of board members, Martinez’s team suggested that there would be cuts to the schools and departments without this additional revenue. Johnson and several board members have said they don’t want cuts but they also want a realistic budget plan.
Martinez has argued that the city should give CPS more money because special taxing districts called TIFs siphon money away from schools. But Johnson has turned over more TIF surplus than previous mayors to CPS and the city is also looking for ways to balance its budget in the face of a deficit. CPS schools also get TIF money for capital projects.
King said she needs to take a thorough look at the school district’s budget and see if there are any redundancies and efficiencies. When asked whether she would consider borrowing to balance the budget for this year, she responded that she would not rule it out.
“Everything has to be on the table in order to ensure that there’s a smooth opening and there’s a minimal impact on what students and parents are expecting to experience on August 18,” she said. Aug. 18 is the first day for CPS.
Martinez was opposed to any borrowing as he saw it as financially irresponsible and his legal team suggested that taking a loan to cover operating expenses could be illegal. But the mayor’s office presented some scenarios that they say are financially prudent. This disagreement is one of the factors that led to his termination.
King said she applied for the CEO position in 2021, but did not get the position. At that point, she kept looking for opportunities to get more involved in education leadership and policy and jumped at the chance to move into the mayor’s office. She was hired by former Mayor Lori Lightfoot in 2022 to be the senior director of educational policy.
King said there are several reasons she wanted to transition out of school leadership. When she was a principal, she had a couple of negligence allegations against her, as first reported by the Chicago Tribune. While she was never disciplined with more than a warning, she said they underscored to her the necessity for principals to be fully supported and for schools to be fully staffed.
Among the allegations investigated: she was accused of delaying the reporting of alleged abuse to child welfare of a student for weeks; two kids were found in a stall together during an afterschool program and in another a student who broke their arm in school and their guardian was not informed, according to CPS the documents, provided through a records request.
As principal, she said she takes full responsibility for what happened in these cases.
“So you all can see documentation of what happened, but there is no documentation of support,” she said. “It’s just not there.”
She adds she was involved in developing the school district’s new accountability system, which measures what schools provide, not just outcomes. “There needs to be inputs to support and improve the out-puts,” she said.
King also was influenced by her experience leading a school that was closed and then leading another school that welcomed students from a closed school. After 12 years as a teacher, she was principal of Dumas on the South Side and then Courtenay Elementary School on the North Side.
She calls the closing of Dumas a “major blow” especially after she said it improved under her leadership.
“I felt like I had been let down by the district,” King said. “This was done to our school community without actually having a conversation and walking us through it and asking deeper questions beyond the numbers so that was tough.”
At Courtenay, she faced the difficult task of bringing together two school communities. Through that, she learned not to be defensive when people were angry.
“They were still in fight mode and I, in some way, represented the district,” King said. She learned how to listen better, she said, and to figure out if the problem was real or if it had to do with communication.
King has a superintendent license, thus fulfilling the requirement set by a resolution recently approved by board members. Since 1995, when the mayor was given the power to unilaterally appoint the entire board, CPS has had a CEO that did not need to have a superintendent’s license.
Sarah Karp covers education for WBEZ. Follow her on X @WBEZeducation and @sskedreporter.