I am not going to speculate on what your motivations are, but I do not believe this is correct. I mean, if you look at your spending, there is a clear indication of what your biggest ambitions are.
What are what?
I think, ultimately, they would like to take over not only the Chicago Public Schools, but also the city government administration. This will happen over time. I really don’t waste any time, and certainly not in the middle of a pandemic, worrying about politics. But politics always intrudes.
I noticed that some large cities with municipal control of the schools are open or preparing for concrete plans to reopen. And some big cities with school boards, like Los Angeles, San Francisco or Seattle, seem stuck. In the past, you supported the return of an elected school council. Where are you now?
We would never have opened it without the mayor’s control. It is quite clear. The fact that LA and San Francisco had to sue to force the conversation about the reopening? Look, what is easy, the path of least resistance, the political expedient, would have been to do nothing and just let the unions dictate what the education situation would be. This will never, never be the path that I will follow
For many families, it will be frustrating that this deal opens the way for only part-time school. And also that high school students are not yet scheduled to return to classrooms.
I am very focused on reopening secondary schools. High school is more complicated, as you can imagine. Primary schools can make students in a pod remain static and teachers move. It is much more challenging to do this in a high school setting. But the archdiocese, which is, I believe, the largest private education system in the country, along with many other private schools, has high schools open since September. We can learn a lot from their experience.
I want to see, in particular, the elderly being able to come back together this year, so that they have a normal experience of last year.