If all goes according to plan, Mayor Daley will call a press conference in a week or two and announce his nominees for the new school board. Then the City Council will approve them, and the press will extol them and credit Daley with acting in the best interest of the city’s 400,000 public school children.
“Many commissioners feel unappreciated,” says Lafayette Ford, who, as chairman of the commission, tries to choose his words carefully. “We put in hundreds of volunteer hours and all we get are delays. Many commissioners feel betrayed.”
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“Mayor Daley is taking his time because this is an important decision,” says Leroy Whiting, the mayoral assistant who acts as a liaison to the commission. “He has been very careful to maintain an appropriate distance from the commission because he doesn’t want to look as though he’s exerting inappropriate influence over their work. Some members may have interpreted that careful approach as indifference. That’s not so. The mayor has always thanked them for their efforts. I would estimate the city spent $9,000 on in-kind services, like printing and legal counseling, for the commission.”
The law that created the commission also established local councils of parents, teachers, and residents in each of the system’s more than 600 schools. The councils have authority over budget and curriculum in their schools; overall policy, including union contracts, is handled by the school board.
They had no budget or bylaws. For the most part, they’ve gotten by on contributions from the First National Bank of Chicago, the Joyce Foundation, and the Board of Education.
But it got complicated, particularly when mayoral appointees Lourdes Monteagudo and Danny Solis tried to explain to their colleagues just who is and isn’t Hispanic.
Six weeks went by without a word. Then the Sun-Times ran an article, based on city documents leaked from unidentified sources, that said Daley would select up to six nominees and reject the others “on grounds that include arrest records, suburban residency, and political activism.”
