* From today’s Q and A with Gov. JB Pritzker…

Q: So you were in Japan when Mayor Brandon Johnson made his decision to get rid of his school board members, and you were with the Senate President and the Illinois House Speaker. Did you have discussions with them about whether there should be legislative action to try to prevent this from happening in the future?

Pritzker: We did not.

Q: Would you like to see some legislative action to kind of take away some of that control that the mayor has to do that?

Pritzker: That’s not something we’re currently discussing. I think there’s a lot to be worked out still, as you know, by the mayor with CPS and the CEO of CPS.

Q: What was your reaction when you saw that happen?

Pritzker: I mean, I think my first reaction was, boy, the time difference is pretty big. It’s hard to get ahold of anybody you know to get kind of on the ground reaction as it was happening. But I, yeah, I think, look, it’s a challenging environment. I think when there are shortfalls in a budget for schools, and you know, where I think some of the one-time money that came into schools was spent in an operating budget. It’s going to be almost impossible to overcome without finding efficiencies within the budget. And we’re, of course, going to continue to increase funding from the state level, as we have every year. And so I hope that CPS will be able to find its level as a result of the work that we’ll do, but, you know, very importantly, the work that they’ll do on the ground in Chicago.

…Adding… Washington Post…

Thousands of people have been hired at the Chicago Public Schools over the past few years, fueled by $2.8 billion in federal covid relief funding. Now the money is gone, but no one wants to reduce the workforce, and an ugly budget fight has plunged one of the nation’s largest districts into a financial and leadership crisis. […]

“This is what it looks like when you burn a district down,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. “It is a level of dysfunction that feels beyond destabilizing, enough to make people lose confidence in the system.” […]

While the mayor faults Martinez for failing to lobby the state for more money for the schools, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) has said that Johnson never personally asked him for more. In any case, Pritzker has shown no willingness to provide the funds.

“I don’t think that that’s the job of Springfield, to rescue the school districts that might have been irresponsible with the one-time money they received,” the governor told Capitol Fax, an Illinois political newsletter. “Poor fiscal management on the part of a local government is not necessarily the responsibility of Springfield.”