What we're fighting for
Respect Taxpayers. Fix the Budget.
Look at your property tax bill. A huge share of it goes to the schools. You deserve to know what you are getting for it.
Right now, nobody can tell you. CPS carries billions in debt. This summer, the appointed Board passed a $10 billion budget that only balances if Springfield sends hundreds of millions the state has never promised. That is not a plan. That is hoping and wishing with your money.
As your board member, I will:
• Vote no on new property tax increases. Period.
• Demand a line by line budget review, published in plain English where every taxpayer can read it.
• Audit programs that cost millions and cannot show results. Start with the Sustainable Community Schools program: more than $25 million a year, and an NBC 5 investigation found its schools still post some of the district's worst attendance and achievement numbers.
• Send every possible dollar to the classroom instead of the bureaucracy.
Quality Education Comes First
For too long, CPS has offered excuses instead of results. In too many schools, most students are not reading or doing math at grade level. That is not our children's fault. It is the system's fault.
Every dollar CPS spends should produce learning. Not comfort for bureaucrats. Not power for political organizations that use our schools to build their own influence.
As your board member, I will:
• Set clear goals for reading and math, measure them honestly, and report them publicly, school by school.
• Back the great teachers in our classrooms, and get them the support and order they need to actually teach.
• Tie new spending to results, so money follows what works for kids.
• Give parents full transparency on curriculum, so you always know what your child is being taught.
Protect Our Children
Nothing else works if our kids are not safe.
In 2024, the Board that Brandon Johnson appointed voted unanimously to pull police officers out of every CPS school. It overrode the Local School Councils that had voted to keep their officers. In the year before that vote, Chicago Police data showed violent crime in CPS schools jumped 26 percent while arrests fell to a record low.
Parents, principals, and Local School Councils know their schools. City Hall does not.
As your board member, I will:
• Restore every Local School Council's right to choose school resource officers for their school.
• Set real discipline standards, so a handful of disruptions cannot steal a classroom's learning.
• Strengthen Safe Passage routes, so kids get to school and home without fear.
• Never play politics with children's safety.
Parents Deserve Real Choices
Families should be able to choose the public school that fits their child. No child should be trapped in a school that is failing them.
Northwest Side families depend on magnet and selective enrollment schools. Brandon Johnson's hand-picked Board passed a resolution to move the district away from school choice. Parents pushed back, and the Board backed off. For now.
As your board member, I will:
• Protect magnet and selective enrollment schools, and fight to expand the seats that work.
• Invest in strong neighborhood schools, so great options start on your own block.
• Hold every school that takes public money, including charters, to the same high standards.
• Make enrollment honest and transparent, so families are never left guessing.
Students Over Special Interests
Our schools should answer to parents and taxpayers. Today, they answer to a political machine.
CTU spent millions to elect Brandon Johnson, its own former organizer, as mayor. Then it sat across the table from him and wrote its own contract. The appointed Board rubber-stamped it all: the borrowing, the budget games, the politics in the classroom.
Let me be clear. I respect the teachers who show up for our kids every day. The CTU's political leadership is not the same thing as the teacher in your child's classroom.
As your board member, I will:
• Answer to the families of District 1A. Not the CTU leadership. Not City Hall.
• End the rubber stamp. Every contract and every major expense gets real public scrutiny.
• Keep political agendas out of the classroom, and keep the focus on reading, math, safety, and discipline.
• Bring common sense back to the Chicago Board of Education.