Jason C. Dónes – District 3

I have studied and promoted culturally relevant pedagogy throughout my career. Those works fueled my passion for education and gave me the words to understand why I hated school as a Puerto Rican boy in CPS. Throughout my education career, I partnered with the Office of Equity (as a member of the Instructional Equity Working Group) in drafting school-based change ideas designed to promote racial justice in schools. I worked with ISBE as a founding member of the Diverse & Learner Ready Teacher Network where I co-wrote and helped pass the state’s first ever culturally responsive teaching standards. This year, I led the Moos LSC in dialogue and decision-making to spend our flex funds on Racial Equity training for school staff. In my day job, I help lead institutional change focused on bettering recruitment, retention and belonging for Black and Brown educators. Racial justice has been the goal at every stage of my career. I will continue fighting for racial justice in our schools with or without this school board position; however, I believe the Board of Education has a powerful responsibility to make district-wide decisions with the explicit goal of promoting racial justice and I would be proud to carry on that work.

I envision a district where every student, regardless of zip code, has access to a fully resourced, top tier neighborhood school. I see a Chicago where parents can trust the strength of the school close to home and we reverse inequities using strong policy. I have much work I want to do on behalf of the students and families of the district but I often center these key priorities:

1. Equitable School Funding: Ensuring that every school receives the resources it needs to thrive is my top priority. Equitable funding is fundamental to providing high-quality education for all students. Without fair and adequate funding, we cannot guarantee that every school has the tools, staff, and support required to meet students’ needs and enhance their learning experiences. Our current system relies too much on the creativity of parents and school staff to stretch a dollar and cover as many positions with as few people as possible.
2. Reinforcing Neighborhood Schools: You cannot reach a vision for quality schools in every community without strong neighborhood schools. We can design a school system where all communities have access to what they need and reject the scarcity and fear-mongering that has families competing for resources.
3. Strengthening CPS programmatic and curricular offerings: Our primary responsibility is to increase achievement so that students experience agency and access throughout their experience. We need to invest in fully staffed and supported special education teams, create safe and inclusive learning environments, expand bilingual education, and provide greater access to quality OST programming. Our school system should be world-class in its offerings and we are seeing it in pockets across the district but I would continue our efforts to strengthen the learning experience.
4. Rejecting Privatization and Reinforcing Public Accountability: I am committed to rejecting efforts to privatize our schools and weaken union organizing efforts and will fight for fair wages, safe working conditions, and collective bargaining rights. Our essential workers deserve respect, support, a living wage, and supportive benefits, as they are the backbone of our education system. I also fight to elevate parent and student voice and ensure that the people in charge feel accountable to the public as opposed to private interests.

Co-governance and public responsibility are central to the importance of an elected board. This commitment means leading in partnership with the community we serve. My campaign is supported by local organizations and elected officials dedicated to movement and organizing, allowing us to engage with our neighbors continually. I believe the best ideas for nurturing student growth come from within the community.

My plan: I will regularly meet with organizing groups that advocate for working-class families and have fought for an elected school board. They have established connections with students and families, and I am ready to listen, learn, and engage.

I will employ effective co-governance strategies, including public forums on key issues, distributing surveys for broader input, and forming sub-committees for more involved constituents. Additionally, I will create a website and email inbox that I will personally monitor, enabling local stakeholders to share their ideas, questions, and feedback directly. I will ensure that every school in the district has an active and well-equipped Local School Council (LSC) connected to board decisions.

I will also push the board to prioritize transparency by publicizing meetings, providing regular updates, and ensuring that documentation is accessible in advance. An easily navigable online platform will be established for meeting agendas, minutes, and reports, giving the community access to vital information.

I don’t accept that advocating for students in my district, and students city-wide are mutually exclusive. This feels like a false choice. It is my belief that if we raise the standards and conditions of every neighborhood in the city to that of our best institutions, we are in turn advocating for every public school student in the city of Chicago, my own included. I’m elected by a district to represent my district, and I serve to better conditions for all students of Chicago.

Our district, city, and state are facing a fiscal crisis, and we’ll often hear, “there’s no money.” The board must push for the funds owed to CPS by the state and advocate for public education. An elected board has a unique opportunity to be heard, and I take that responsibility seriously.

I want the board to review administrative overhead and non-essential costs to eliminate bloat and ensure resources are used wisely. I plan to bring my experience managing school budgets as a Local School Council Chair where I regularly collaborate with parents and school leaders to prioritize spending in a way that maximizes student outcomes despite serious financial constraints. I plan to bring my experience managing an organization budget in which I manage tradeoffs in an effort to prioritize equity, impact, and needs.

I would support a third-party independent audit of Chicago Public Schools. Transparency and accountability are crucial elements in building a public education system that best serves students. An audit would provide an unbiased assessment of CPS’s financial practices, which is essential for identifying inefficiencies and ensuring funds are directed to the most impactful areas.

I believe that achieving equity means every Chicagoan should have access to a fully resourced neighborhood public school. While this should be as simple as applying the equity-based funding (EBF) model universally, bad policy makes it more complicated, and we must advocate for what we are owed. Transparency is crucial, and I hope my fellow board members agree that CPS’s budget process must be more open. The current convoluted process wouldn’t be acceptable for any other public body, and it shouldn’t be for CPS. As elected officials, we must demand full transparency on how tax dollars are spent.

A more equitable process requires regular, accessible community meetings and opportunities for families and educators to have a voice in resource distribution. I also support an independent audit of CPS with a focus on neighborhood school funding. This would provide an unbiased assessment of financial practices, ensuring funds are directed to key areas like special education, mental health services, and staffing. Every dollar should uplift our children based on their needs.

Quality education means ensuring that all students, regardless of background, ability, or zip code have access to the resources, and the support they need to thrive. It means creating a sense of belonging, and safety in the classroom. It means recognizing the importance of emotional well-being, resilience, interpersonal skills, and trauma-informed practices, and integrating these into the curriculum. It means fostering a culture that embraces love and encourages students to be lifelong learners. It means maintaining a culturally relevant lens so that students are affirmed for who they are, what they know, and how they best learn. We achieve this through implementing an equitable funding model, and developing a workforce that reflects the students they teach. I would push CPS to partner with organizations like “Grow Your Own” that work to recruit teachers who come from our neighborhoods and focus on community-based solutions to address the teacher diversity gap.

The Black Student Success Working Group (BSSWG) has provided a clear plan to close the achievement gap by implementing culturally relevant curriculum, leveraging wraparound services, and recruiting more Black educators—proven practices that lead to success. I will ensure the new board prioritizes Black student success and turns these recommendations into action.

The African American community should have a strong voice in selecting the Black Student Achievement committee, and I will ensure it is well-supported. I will build on BSSWG’s recommendations, using my experience as a culturally relevant educator and policy leader to turn ideas into practice. Having helped draft the state’s first culturally responsive teaching standards, I want to see that work applied at the classroom level. In my day job, I focus on improving recruitment, retention, and belonging for Black and Brown educators, and I will reinforce these priorities on the committee.

I went to a neighborhood school, a magnet school, and a selective enrollment high school and I understand a low-income parent’s struggle to find the highest quality education in Chicago. I taught in a charter school environment as well as a neighborhood school and think often about those different experiences.

As a parent to a current CPS student, my priority has been to strengthen our neighborhood schools. They are essential for working-class families and by focusing here, we address local needs directly and ensure that all have access to a high-quality education close to home. We must reverse decades of disinvestment if we truly aim to provide quality schools for all.

Our selective enrollment schools deserve to stay strong and continue to be a well-resourced source for a quality education; and I believe a system that relies on a dozen high quality schools is broken. I believe a system in which students compete for a handful of spots to gain access to a trajectory-defining education is broken. All neighborhoods deserve a school as strong as our selective enrollment schools and that is why I fight for all schools while prioritizing neighborhood schools which cannot turn you away and must provide for all.

Our charter schools serve thousands of students. I want those students to succeed. However, I cannot support charter expansion while our neighborhood schools remain underfunded, and I reject the further privatization of our public schools. I am an advocate for transparency, oversight and collective bargaining. Any publicly funded school should be accountable to the public, including its students and workforce.

Our district has seen a significant increase in new arrivals to the U.S. While these students bring diversity and resilience, they also face unique challenges that our schools must address. Many require more than academic support—they need language assistance, mental health services, and help navigating a new education system.

CPS should take strategic action by expanding bilingual programming, hiring more multilingual staff, and providing wraparound services through their welcoming centers. Additionally, CPS should strengthen partnerships with local community organizations that support new arrival families, offering resources like housing assistance and legal services. These collaborations will create a more robust support network for students and their families.

My plan to improve access and accountability includes (1) fully staffing schools to support SPED teams and (2) empowering parents with knowledge and resources.

SPED teams need better training, funding, and staffing. SPED teachers and SECAs are often stretched thin, with case managers splitting time across schools, leaving students without the full range of services and parents frustrated. We need more staff and time for collaboration to meet legal guidelines effectively.

My godson was an intelligent, non-verbal black boy walking into his CPS experience. Throughout his first year, I stepped in as his advocate in IEP meetings because his mother felt like she did not have the knowledge or support to navigate those meetings and often feels alone. There are also so many rules and layers to understand. For parents, knowledge is access. I will create support groups for parents and connect with advocacy organizations so that people can better understand the steps and resources available before having to navigate it. You cannot take advantage of services you do not understand or know exist. Once a parent has provided consent, we have a strict legal timeline and schools need to be set up to meet that timeline. I will also advocate for a centrally managed grievance system so that schools are given reinforcement (high support and high accountability) when it is clear they are out of compliance.

I support the Whole School Safety plan as a vital step in redefining school safety through culturally responsive practices, restorative justice, and healing. Effective implementation is crucial. I would enhance the plan by providing real-world examples and best practices to help staff apply these ideas immediately. A dedicated oversight committee should monitor progress and gather feedback from students, parents, and the community.

Professional development and accountability are essential for improving school environments. I will ensure that all Whole School Safety Committees receive the data and resources they need, just as I would for LSCs. Drawing from my research on fostering belonging in classrooms, I aim to implement proven strategies that create inclusive learning environments and reduce the disproportionate targeting of Black and Latino students.

What we can’t do is pursue punitive actions against students or families for chronic absenteeism. The root causes—poverty, disinvestment, violence, lack of transportation, and housing insecurity—are similar to those of crime. Around 21,855 CPS students live in “temporary living situations,” which can range from staying with relatives to being homeless. Students can’t focus on school when they lack stability or basic needs like food and shelter. Our social safety nets are failing, and schools are often the last support. We must push state and federal officials to invest in affordable housing, healthcare, and youth employment to address the deeper issues that affect student attendance and success

CPS has an incredible resource and partner with City Colleges of Chicago, and both institutions need to be doing more to lower the barriers schools participating in their dual credit programs. Expanding the pool of professors who teach dual credit, open space in CPS for accredited faculty to come teach dual credit on site, and increasing the number of subjects that can be offered as dual credit are all good first steps to better utilizing existing resources. Extra measures such as providing transportation for students to and from City Colleges, free transit passes, and food vouchers to CCC’s food halls are all things to explore to incentivize students.

To provide all students with a high-quality, evidence-based curriculum, we must balance centralized support with school-level autonomy. At Moos, we faced this challenge while budgeting. Transitioning to Skyline could save us thousands and fund other priorities, but it isn’t yet the preferred curriculum for all grade levels. We chose to phase it in over a few years, starting with the earlier grades, to remain responsive to our teachers’ experiences. This is one example of striking a balance and rolling out curriculum as intentionally as possible. Skyline is a solid research-backed option and from my observation, it is still improving. It should remain optional so schools can adapt instruction to meet the unique needs of their communities. The district should provide professional development and resources to ensure that any curriculum, whether Skyline or locally designed, meets the diverse needs of our students. This approach will help close opportunity gaps and improve academic outcomes in schools all across our city.

I see the LSC as the voice of the school, representing students, teachers, and the community to the board. For this relationship to work, the board must recognize the LSC in that role. As an LSC member, I understand the balance of community needs in a chronically underfunded district. As a board member, I will engage actively with LSCs by attending meetings, building relationships, and being their voice. I envision monthly meetings with all LSC representatives to share experiences and find creative solutions together. This must be a symbiotic, not top-down, relationship.

I am supported by local organizations and officials rooted in organizing and community engagement, which means we are always in conversation with our neighbors. The best ideas for nurturing students come from the community and students themselves. I will center the voices of those often excluded from decision-making through tools like student surveys, listening tours, and school visits. Public schools must be accountable to the people they serve.

No one ever praised a principal for their stellar paperwork. By freeing principals from excessive paperwork, we empower principals to be the transformative leaders their schools need, allowing them to address unique challenges facing their school communities and focus on bigger-picture goals like cultivating a healthy school culture. However, this autonomy has to come with accountability to ensure equity and consistency.

LSCs should continue to play a central role in hiring and retaining principals, as they are most closely connected to the needs of their school communities. We should also demand that LSCs diversify their selection committees to best represent their entire school community. While the district’s oversight is important to maintain equitable standards across all CPS schools, LSCs should be empowered to advocate for leadership that aligns with the values and priorities of their communities.

The closure of CPS schools under Rahm Emanuel disproportionately affected Black and Brown students, particularly in under-resourced neighborhoods on Chicago’s South and West Sides. In my district, the impact was devastating. Schools are more than just educational spaces—they’re community hubs. Research shows these closures didn’t deliver promised academic improvements or cost savings but instead caused trauma, destabilized neighborhoods, and eroded trust in CPS. This broken, inhumane strategy of closing under-enrolled schools in the name of efficiency has proven ineffective and damaging and is a major reason why we are here now fighting for community representation on the board. We’ve already seen what is possible when we provide our schools with the proper resources. When we rally around our schools and invest in them, students succeed. The best plan for addressing underutilization and ensuring that these buildings are brought back online in a way that actually serves the communities in which they are found is to set a vision using the hopes and ideas FROM the community.

The success of our schools relies on the well-being and empowerment of teachers, principals, custodial staff, and support teams. When staff have fair contracts with proper resources, working conditions, and professional development, students thrive. In collective bargaining, I would prioritize transparency, collaboration, and equity. Open communication ensures accountability and buy-in, helping everyone understand decisions and trade-offs. Equity means addressing the unique challenges of different schools, so resources reach the communities that need them most.

As a former teacher, within various models, I know how staff often stretch themselves to compensate for limited resources. These negotiations should uplift both our workforce and the students they serve, not perpetuate burnout or harm. These people show up every day ready to work, give, and serve their community with skill and care. We should not perpetuate conditions that lead to burnout, stagnation, or harm to working families. These negotiations should not be framed as a zero-sum game but as an opportunity to create conditions that uplift both our workforce and the children they serve.

District 3 has much to offer, from committed teachers and collaborative parents to strong community organizations. However, we also face systemic challenges like under-resourced special education teams, limited access to quality afterschool programs, and wraparound needs affecting student achievement.

Funding is our biggest issue, and disparities are evident across our school communities. None of our schools are as well-resourced as their suburban counterparts; however, in this district we have some of the best schools in the state blocks away from schools harmed by continued disinvestment. While our magnet and selective enrollment schools excel, neighborhood schools need reinforcement. Recently, our local school council had to choose between investing in restorative justice programming or a more effective math curriculum, because we could not have both. That is not a choice a school should face annually.

If elected, I will advocate for necessary funding and collaborate with parents and community members on what an equitable resource distribution can look like. No one wants to lose out and no student should but our neighborhood schools will die without intervention. Our district overwhelmingly wants to be able to trust in–and invest in–the schools that are close to home.