Jessica Biggs – District 6

My career has been devoted to both improving the lives of underserved children and fighting systemic racism. I currently work as a community leader and organizer with the Southwest Organizing Project (SWOP) building systems of partnership between schools, healthcare, behavioral health and community-based organizations that work to support the holistic needs of students and families. I serve on the Board of Metropolitan Family Services at Midway. I served as the southwest side community leader on Mayor Lightfoot’s Racial Equity Rapid Response Team during the COVID pandemic, and I also served as the principal of Burke Elementary in Bronzeville from 2012-2018.

As the parent of a CPS student and a former school principal, I have had a front row seat to CPS’s many successes and failures. The most pressing issue is that of equitable school funding. To this end, I support using CPS’s Opportunity Index to guarantee that funding is equitably distributed to schools, but I also support evaluating the impact of that formula to ensure it distributes funds to schools in the way that school communities need. Fundamentally, I support growing the total pie of available funding for all schools by advocating for the governor and State Legislature to fully fund the Evidence Based Funding formula. Aside from funding, our school leaders and students know and acutely feel the impact of a severe staffing shortage. We must support career ladders that support and lift interested parties in taking on many of our hard to staff roles. We need to provide funding and pay for certification and the time it takes to complete those pathways. We need to offer signing bonuses for critical but hard-to-staff positions, and we need to formalize teacher-leader roles with pay that retain our very best talent. I also see improving achievement and mental health as major issues that the Board must tackle. As a school leader, I improved reading and math achievement by selecting rigorous curricula, investing in teacher and staff professional development, creating time for proper planning, and consistently prioritizing collaboration. Collaborative planning and reflection around teacher practice and student data are essential to ensure lessons are responsive to student needs and foster academic growth. To apply the above at scale, we need to ensure that our schools have the funds, staff, and time in teachers’ schedules to support such systems of collaboration and development. Lastly, we must diligently care for our students’ mental health. This means ensuring that our schools are the safe, supportive community anchors our kids and families deserve by properly funding and staffing school-based mental health resources and facilitating partnerships with community-based organizations to provide holistic wrap-around services for families.

I intend to take a proactive approach. I will always seek out the views of communities of interest and the organizations nested within them. By actively bringing community-based organizations to the table on particular issues facing the communities they serve, I can craft policy in which people are invested and which actually works to solve real issues. I also intend to incorporate community-based organizations into the policy making process by encouraging them to proactively bring issues to my attention. If I don’t know that there is a problem, I can’t solve it. By leveraging the closeness of community-based organizations to their communities, I can seek to solve problems to which I would otherwise have been blind. I also commit to full transparency and communication with the community. I intend to hold monthly collaborative meetings that will allow for dialogue between community stakeholders and myself. In addition to dialogue, I will intend to report on CPS news and upcoming decisions. It is important that this monthly space is structured as a space for collaborative dialogue so that communication is truly bi-directional. In response to the last question, I believe I am being elected to advocate for all students across the city, and especially those in my district.

CPS has a budget gap that is large and baring concerted action will only get larger.

• Advocate for the State to merge the Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund and the Teachers’ Retirement System of the State of Illinois to equalize state pension funding for CPS and every other school district in the state.
• Seek efficiencies in the delivery of capital plan projects. In particular, I will implement design-build, enhance standardization across contracts, and create revolving funds for maintenance to ensure that we move away from expensive one-and-done project funding.
• Utilize all future one-time funds to underwrite non-recurring spending.

I would support an independent audit.

Equitable school funding is essential to addressing all other educational issues. We must ensure that every school has the resources to provide strong, equitable learning environments for all students, including special education and bilingual learners. This is a fundamental responsibility and must always remain a priority. The first step to ensure equitable funding is guaranteeing there is sufficient funding. To this end, I believe that we need to work with our state legislators to fully fund CPS through the State’s Evidence-Based Funding Formula. Just as important as the total size of the pie is how it is divided. I support the use of CPS’s Opportunity Index to ensure that all of our schools are adequately and equitably funded. However, with any new blanket formula we need to investigate the impact of its implementation to ensure that no students are left out. Metrics need to be added to ensure that specialty programming is available where schools or communities seek it. Strong schools mean strong communities and every neighborhood in Chicago deserves a strong school.

The opportunity gap is huge. I have and will continue to work to address it tirelessly. The implementation of the Opportunity Index and move away from Student Based Budgeting is a good first step to ensure equitable funding and programming options for students and schools historically disinvested in. Without full and fair funding, we cannot hope to achieve equity in opportunity. I will also fully support building the infrastructure to support the implementation of the work of the Office of Black Student Success and the Black Student Success Plan. As always, we need to monitor progress to ensure that implementation leads to the intended outcomes to close opportunity gaps for African American students across the district.

Black kids have been left behind. I will do everything I can to close the achievement gap including fully staffing the Black Student Achievement Committee. I commit to listening to and acting on its recommendations. Additionally, I commit to guaranteeing that the African American community has a strong voice in the selection of the Black Student Achievement committee members. I will put the money where my mouth is and prioritize funding for the Committee, as it deserves.

While I support the Board’s recent moves to prioritize neighborhood schools, I believe we must not let that prioritization take the form of underfunding our district’s magnet and selective enrollment schools. We need to evaluate the impact of the Opportunity Index on school level budgets and ensure that all of our schools have the staff they need. For far too long, neighborhood schools that serve predominantly Black and brown students have been inadequately funded and we need to seize this moment to shift that disinvestment. Additionally, we have a responsibility to support our students who currently attend charter and contract schools, and we must not disrupt the education of students who are currently enrolled. However, I am not in support of opening any additional charters or maintaining any charters that have shown to be consistently underperforming. Additionally, I do not support diverting any additional public funds to further charter growth.

We do not provide sufficient resources for ELL students and their parents. For one, there is a profound shortage of teachers with bilingual certification. I support funding the coursework needed to achieve bilingual certification and offering test-in opportunities for multilingual speakers. This would allow people to achieve temporary licensure more quickly as they work toward more permanent certification. Additionally, we have many parents who are bilingual speakers; we should consider ways to hire them in support roles to supplement core bilingual instruction. For parents, especially those who have recently arrived, CPS is often deeply challenging to navigate. I support providing navigators, who are fluent in each individual’s native languages, to help them chart their course through the system.

In many ways, this inadequate delivery of services is a staffing issue. We must do everything in our power to create and support pathways to proper certification for these roles. We need to ensure a strong pipeline for bus drivers by offering funding for Commercial Driver’s Licensure training and exams and offer both in English and Spanish. We need to partner with existing programs that provide strong pipelines into paraprofessional roles like the Parent Mentor Program and the Ladders of Opportunity program through the Parent Engagement Institute that supports parents in obtaining paraprofessional certification. We need to expand residency programs for teachers pursuing their Special Education certification and provide pay for coursework in addition to signing bonuses for all of these challenging-to-staff roles. Additionally, we need to decrease the ratio of students to school psychologists to enable expedient referral and testing processes for students who need them.

I support implementing and funding CPS’s new whole school safety plan. The culture of our schools needs to reflect care, joy, community and safety. We don’t do this by policing our students but rather through thoughtful facilitation of relationship building between students and between staff and students. Building and sustaining these relationships requires adequate resources. Each school should be equipped with a counselor, a social worker, along with a restorative justice or school culture coordinator to meaningfully support students’ wellbeing.

The best way to combat chronic absenteeism is to make schools places that kids want to be and that parents want their kids to be. We can achieve this by working on school cultures to move them in the direction of joy, care, community and academic rigor. We can also work to shift the physical form of schools. At their best a school should be a community’s living room. They shouldn’t look like drab institutions.

This is a problem that has its roots in a lack of leadership. There is tremendous opportunity to partner with City Colleges to offer a myriad of dual credit opportunities and expand enrollment in City College courses. By prioritizing dual credit opportunities in partnership with City Colleges we can begin to move CPS towards the statewide average and eventually exceed it.

It’s essential to involve teacher-leaders from across the district in collaboration with CPS central office staff to determine an appropriate array of core curriculum options authorized by the board of education. This approach ensures that curriculum options meet the diverse needs of communities across the district. Schools and networks should then have support and flexibility to choose from these options, allowing them to make curriculum decisions that best suit their local context while adhering to district-wide standards.

We need to partner with organizations like Raise Your Hand to expand training and support of Local School Councils. Additionally, as a newly elected board member, I propose a monthly (school board) district-wide convening of LSC chairs in a manner that allows LSC chairs to collaborate and communicate with one another. The work of LSCs looks very different from school to school and there is a tremendous opportunity for members to learn from one another, troubleshoot together and also communicate directly with their elected school board member.

Except in the most extreme of cases, I think the Board should let LSC decisions stand and give principals the broadest autonomy possible. The accumulation of too much power anywhere is a problem; this applies to both accumulation of power in the Board and LSCs.

I support turning those buildings into community spaces. I like the model implemented by the Timothy Community Corporation. I would seek to expand that city-wide. I also am an advocate for transforming shuttered schools into health clinics, third places, and social service centers. What is important to me is that the community takes the lead. I want the people living in the community to have leadership over how we revitalize these historic assets. Funding would come from competitive grants, rent, and private philanthropy.

As an elected representative it will be my obligation to act in my constituents’ interests. As we collectively bargain, we must keep in mind the tension AND the synergy between the interests of the staff and students. By acknowledging every participant’s positionality we can seek to negotiate agreements that are in everyone’s interest. As it is critically important that Board members are immersed in the priorities of their communities, this includes the priorities of the principals in their district schools. As a board member, I envision starting the day in a district school to connect and walk with the principal after students are settled in classrooms to get a sense of each school’s unique strengths and challenges from the perspective of the principal. It will also be critical to maintain a close and transparent line of communication with CPAA leadership.

Our city is still reeling from the impact of the 2013 closures. Not only did closing schools not create the hoped for savings, but student outcomes suffered profoundly. We need to work with school communities to determine the best use of under-utilized spaces. There is tremendous opportunity to co-locate health centers, community-based organizations and the like in school spaces not used for classrooms. These co-locations can work to build our schools as true community anchors that bring needed resources to communities at large.

Additionally, The Greater Bronzeville Community Action Council (GBCAC), which represents a large portion of District 6b, has collaborated with Bright Star Community Outreach and the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work Policy & Practice to develop a community action plan for education. Informed by relevant data and input from principals, teachers, students, parents, and community members, this plan aims to improve educational outcomes by addressing key concerns such as student achievement, school culture and climate, and overall mental health and well-being. I look forward to working with the GBCAC and all its stakeholders to implement this data-informed, community-driven plan.