The Board of Education approved the Chicago Teachers Union’s new contract agreement Thursday, putting the final touch on a deal that took almost a year to negotiate.
The four-year, $1.5 billion contract is now official after union members also ratified it with 97% approval earlier this month. The deal is retroactive to July 2024 and will run through June 2028.
“At its core, this contract fairly rewards the excellent work of our educators, makes investments that are financially responsible for the district and keeps the best interests of our students at the forefront,” Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez said at Thursday’s monthly school board meeting.
He added that he was “proud our teams were able to work together to avoid the kind of labor strife that has been so disruptive to our families in the past.”
While there was significant tension that eventually led to Martinez’s firing and a divide between CPS and City Hall, CTU President Stacy Davis Gates agreed that CPS and CTU landed “a contract that did not require a strike vote [or] a strike. That is a significant development considering up to this point that is what it has taken to get us here.”
She called the deal an “inflection point in what we believe will be the transformation of our school district.
The contract gives teachers 4-5% pay raises in each of the four years; provides extra pay for veteran teachers; sets lower class size limits; increases funding for sports programs; and hires potentially hundreds more staff positions, including 90 new librarians in a district with a scarcity of functioning school libraries.
The Board of Education voted 19-0 — with one abstention from board member Debby Pope, a former CTU official — to approve the agreement and also to amend the district’s budget to use its remaining dollars this school year to cover the cost of the deal’s first year.
But there are questions about how CPS will pay for the subsequent three years given the more than $500 million deficit expected as soon as next school year. Martinez said “many avenues [are] being explored.”
“What we know for certain is that our financial outlook for the next several years is challenging, and we must work together to find new revenue to fund our schools,” said Martinez, who is leaving the district in June.
Martinez said district officials and board members will join community leaders in Springfield next Tuesday to lobby state lawmakers for more education funding for all Illinois school districts.
Davis Gates applauded that effort.
“We’re going to need everyone and then some to bring back what Chicago Public Schools has deserved for generations,” she said.
