As the sky turned pink and baby blue on the east end of 71st Street in Englewood, teachers and staff from Carrie Jacobs Bond Elementary School began to arrive for a four-hour picket on the first day of their strike over stalled contract negotiations with Chicago Public Schools. Bundled up with union T-shirts pulled over thick hoodies and warm coats, they exchanged cheerful greetings, set up a table of donated food for kids, and handed out picket signs. “On strike for my students,” many of them read.
Bond sits on a stretch of 71st Street renamed for Emmett Till, in an attendance boundary where the median income is around $25,000 and nearly half of the residents live below the poverty line. Its roughly 270 students are 95.2 percent Black and 99.6 percent low income. A quarter have special education requirements, and nearly 40 percent have transferred in or out of the school in the last year.
CTU strike day one#
Like many other CPS schools, Bond lacks a gym teacher, art classes, music, and foreign language instruction. However, it’s luckier than some schools, especially those serving primarily Black students—Bond has a librarian and a full-time guidance counselor, Tijuana Gipson. Still, due to an overall staffing shortage, Gipson explained over the sound of exuberant honks from passing traffic, she’s not in a position to fully attend to students’ needs. Guidance counselors provide social and emotional skills training to full classes, smaller and more specialized groups of students, and in one-on-one sessions. When they teach full classes they’re technically not supposed to play a disciplinary role but instead come into a classroom already staffed by its permanent teacher. This way, students are better able to develop a therapeutic relationship with the counselor, whom they see as a neutral presence and not someone who punishes them for misbehaving. But, due to short staffing, Gipson has to handle classrooms alone to relieve teachers during planning periods. “I’m helping provide that break for the teachers,” she explained, “and that kind of erases the boundary of school counselor/advocate to put me in a disciplinarian role. It creates a conflict for the students—can I trust her or not?”
The teaching assistant said she was disappointed in Lightfoot’s attitude toward the teachers’ demands after watching last night’s newscast. “You want us to stay in Chicago, we need to be able to survive. If I had this wage increase I don’t need my night job, I’ll be at home more, I’ll be able to focus more in school. But she don’t understand that,” she said. “I regret voting her in.”
