Margaret “Maggie” Cullerton Hooper – District 2

I have spent more than ten years working to examine internalized white supremacy, facilitating affinity groups, organizing alongside racial justice movement leaders, and working to build the requisite humility and self-awareness to be a productive member of a multiracial, democratic body through a limited individual lens. Racial bias and, specifically, anti-Black racism, is a deeply rooted issue that requires a commitment on the personal, interpersonal, institutional, and systemic levels.

I believe that it will be crucial to center the voices and leadership of Black and brown Board members while doing the labor required where appropriate and invited.

I take my responsibility to decenter whiteness, ground in collective humanity, and maintain self-awareness and humility very seriously in all aspects of my life. I have become practiced in receiving input without defensiveness, but I also believe that there is no graduation from doing this work.

Through an internalized grasp of solidarity and belonging, I have come to understand how critical lived experience is to dismantle oppressive systems. I am the only candidate in the entire city who is both a person with disabilities and the parent of a child with disabilities. The Chicago Board of Education has NEVER had a member who identifies as a person with disabilities. I find that unacceptable and deeply unjust, and this drove my impetus to run. Diversity without disability is not diversity and I believe disability justice is a critical aspect of a truly intersectional framework.

My long-term vision for Chicago Public Schools is one where every child can walk to an excellent neighborhood school.

The best way to make sure that every child has access to high quality, culturally relevant curriculum and the many, many other resources needed to ensure kids and families have the schools they deserve, is to increase the funds available to CPS and ensure funds are allocated using an equitable, needs-based funding model.

For the first time in the history of Chicago Public Schools, the district is allocating funds using a methodology that is evidence-based, student centered, and that finally attempts to address the legacy of extraction, segregation, and oppression of marginalized students. This funding model takes those steps while establishing district-wide baseline standards, class sizes, and per-pupil funding rates.

I have a robust and detailed policy platform (you can find it at www.maggieforchicago.com/issues) that clearly and publicly demonstrate the initiatives I would champion to achieve this vision including but not limited to:

• Special Education
• LGBTQIA+ In CPS
• Black Student Success
• Non-Citizen Representation
• Community Engagement
• Sex Ed
• CPS Budget
• Needs-Based Funding
• Transparency

I have been actively engaging parents in the schools of District 2 for many years now, co-building the scaffolding within and across our schools that can serve as a strong foundation when I join the School Board.

I will continue to prioritize direct communications with District 2 constituents, being available to parents, students, educators and neighbors, establishing monthly email communications and monthly LSC convenings, planning regular town-hall sessions for students, and holding pre- and post- board meeting prep/follow up sessions for community members.

Additionally, I believe that CPS MUST entirely reconsider their definition, conception, and implementation of community engagement. In our current system, programs and policies move through a closed, administrative system and are presented to the Board BEFORE there is any discussion of community input, let alone meaningful co-creation efforts.

After clearing those myriad bureaucratic hurdles, it is presented to the community for their “input”. This is unacceptable. Once elected, I will fight for a collaborative process to redesign and reframe the way that CPS approaches “community engagement”.

I have been very clear about my belief that my children cannot succeed unless every child can succeed and I believe that principle must be centered in the work that we do as members of the board of education. It will be our responsibility to make sure that the voices of every stakeholder is represented at the table and we must make decisions that understand that we are all connected – every student in the city should be at the heart of everything we do. Advocating for students in District 2 means advocating for students in every other district, as well.

IMMEDIATE SOLUTION: Currently, Illinois funds legacy pension contributions for schools outside Chicago, while Chicago must cover these costs through property taxes, unfairly burdening CPS. This inequity, a little-known factor in state underfunding of public schools, must be addressed. The Board should push the legislature to resume funding legacy pension costs or advocate for merging the state and Chicago teacher pension funds. This merger would strengthen teachers statewide and prevent future underfunding, freeing up $550M – $640M to reinvest in CPS.

THREE STRATEGIC LONG-TERM SOLUTIONS:

1. Earned Revenue: Many schools generate income by renting rooftops to telecom companies or parking to businesses. Meanwhile, unused district-owned buildings drain resources. We need to diversify revenue through partnerships that support neighborhood economies and generate income for CPS.
2. Sunsetting Costly Underperforming Contracts: Outsourcing to for-profit companies like Aramark for financial efficiency has failed, leading to opaque, costly systems that leave schools in disrepair and undermine union jobs. Rebuilding internal infrastructure for maintenance, supervised by principals, will improve services and reduce costs.
3. Balanced Budgets & Financial Sustainability: The Board must collaborate on pension reform without reducing benefits, developing a multi-year plan for debt service and reamortization. Reviewing capital budgets, creating a public database of investments, and ensuring transparency are essential. New program investments should not come from facilities budgets.

I support an independent third-party audit of CPS, and I would be selective about the criteria for choosing the auditor. Having worked in city government, I’m familiar with the challenges of auditing public funds and ensuring transparency across tax-exempt and financial management models.

As stated above, I strongly support the needs-based funding model and will make keeping it in practice, strengthening it, and improving the transparency around its implementation a top priority when I serve on the Board.

That said, it will be absolutely essential that the Board and the district prioritize transparency and create systems for individual schools to maintain key programs (like dual language education programs at schools with high EL enrollment). The Board must lead on sharing information, communicating internal processes, and educating Chicagoans about the budget process, methodologies, and allocations that determine school level budgets.

We need a fully transparent process in place to appeal, assess, and address gaps in initial budget determinations and the budget process should begin much earlier to allow for meaningful community input.

I found the choice to hold off on publicly releasing the budgets disappointing, especially knowing that CPS does not have the trust of our communities, and the continued refusal to release that information was detrimental to the district and the Board. Even schools that benefited from the new model were left with concerns and uncertainty. The choice created resentment and perpetuated the adversarial relationship our community already has with CPS and the Board of Education. The community should not be asked to trust that a budget model is serving the purpose the Board claims, and with good reason.

As a member of the Board of Education, I would demand CPS publish their budget AND that each individual school do the same.The truth is, there are any number of revenue streams that schools access beyond central funding: student fees, earned revenue from rentals and programs, contributed revenue from donors, friends-of organizations, boosters, etc. We cannot effectively make the case for increased funding if we cannot look at the true cost of producing the highest educational outcomes.

I will advocate for incorporating all recommendations from the Black Student Success working group into the district’s strategic plan. I attended several sessions and witnessed the labor that built this robust, achievable platform. We’ve long neglected and extracted the Black community, and rebuilding trust with Black students and families will be a decades-long process.

Everyone in this city is harmed when we pretend to commit to Black Chicagoans while selectively acting to appear as though we care. Either Black student success is a priority, or it isn’t. I am fully committed to this priority and will fight to incorporate every recommendation.

One of the most impactful actions the Board can take is expanding the Black educator workforce with urgency. The systematic elimination of Black educators in CPS has been the predictable outcome of sweeping policy reforms over the past 30 years, from the devastation of Renaissance 2010 to school closures under the Emanuel administration, driven by manipulated “utilization” data. When Chicago closes schools, Black schools are disproportionately affected, and Black teachers are purged.

This destabilizes Black middle-class communities, and there is overwhelming evidence that Black educators significantly improve Black student outcomes. Black students with one Black teacher by third grade are 7% more likely to graduate high school and 13% more likely to enroll in college. With two Black teachers, their likelihood of enrolling in college increases by 32%. These statistics are just one example of the impact Black educators have.

The Chicago Teachers Union has long provided insights and policy reforms to increase Black teacher recruitment, such as reestablishing a hiring pipeline through Chicago State University. As a member of the Board of Education, I will prioritize translating these recommendations and those from other experts into actionable policy changes.

As a white woman, I believe that it will be critical to elect members who have invested time in interrogating and dismantling our socialization and who fundamentally understand the limits of our lens. As mentioned above, I believe that I am practiced in the humility that will be required to be a productive member of a multi-racial, democratic body. I am deeply committed to centering Black experiences and doing this work as appropriate and invited. I will not compromise on establishing the Black Student Achievement Committee AND ensuring that its members have the resources required to make meaningful change for Black students.

I strongly believe that CPS needs a long-term approach to ensure that every child can walk to an excellent neighborhood school.

Our current system is often painted as one where families and students have a “choice”, but any CPS family knows that could not be farther from the truth. A district with chronically underfunded neighborhood schools, small regional schools that can only serve a fraction of our gifted students, and a few exceptional options that are the only alternative for a tiny fraction of students is not a district where any of us has a “choice”.

We must create a long-term, transparent plan to increase funding to neighborhood schools that does not make those investments at the expense of the only options available to students currently navigating the deeply inequitable systems we have built to date.

I do not object to magnet or specialty schools being available to students who want to pursue fine arts, STEM, trade programs, or other educational opportunities and I believe that, once we are able to provide quality education to all our students, the landscape for selective enrollment and magnet schools may look very different than it does today. When we center and invest in our neighborhood schools, we build up all of our children and create a public school district that draws families and residents to every corner of our city.

Lastly, I will not support the opening of any additional charter schools in Chicago. That being said, I do not want to see the trauma and devastation that comes from school closures and will strongly oppose the closure of any current CPS schools, including charters. Whether we would’ve chosen it or not, many charter schools have taken the place of the neighborhood school in communities across the city. We must seek to understand the current landscape and what every school, regardless of governance, has come to mean to their communities.

My children attend a school with a two-way, immersive dual language education program and I have seen first hand how difficult it is to identify and hire educators with the requisite bilingual teaching certifications. The district must work with all of our education workforce development partners to dramatically increase the certified bilingual educators in CPS schools. I would support efforts to incentivise current educators to secure bilingual certifications, to ensure a robust pipeline in partnership with post-secondary institutions, and to identify innovative opportunities to recruit new teachers to this field.

CPS must completely overhaul its culture and practices regarding students with disabilities. People with disabilities do not have deficits; we function within systems that do. Yet, CPS prioritizes legal compliance over genuine service, with the largest legal team of any city department or sister agency, focused on avoiding lawsuits rather than ensuring every child can learn. This is unacceptable.

While protecting municipalities from litigation can and should be one of their roles, we must demand that internal teams work through a comprehensive, collaborative, and long-term reimagining of their central purpose.

Most of our schools begin each year with a dramatically understaffed special education team – this is a huge barrier to their ability to identify, assess, evaluate, establish 504s and IEPs, and secure appropriate placements when applicable.

Each year, the district calculates funding based on the number of students with IEPs and minutes of service, subtracting outgoing students. However, they do not project the incoming or newly identified students needing IEPs, particularly in the 1st through 3rd grades. This results in schools like Hibbard losing 3 SPED staff positions and 0.5-1.5 case managers in the initial budget, leaving them understaffed for the first half of the year. Although the funding is later restored during mid-year reallocation, the process of scrambling to rehire repeats year after year.

I will work to amend this flawed allocation methodology, ensuring a more accurate projection of needs and staffing without requiring new funds or cuts to other budget areas.

All efforts to address community and school safety must include substantive protections that are grounded in gender based violence education and prevention efforts.

The Chicago Public School District has struggled tremendously to implement the comprehensive, medically-accurate and age appropriate curriculum that is mandated by state law. Chicago’s 2019 Healthy Schools Survey revealed that only 42% of schools are teaching all of the required sex ed minutes, and only 62% of schools complied with the requirement to send caregivers an annual letter about the curriculum with an opt-out option. In 2018, those numbers were far worse with only 28% of schools teaching the required minutes and only 50% of schools sending home the notification and opt-out letter.

So while the current numbers show an improvement, it remains deeply disturbing that the district continues to fall short on implementing a policy that was passed into law over ten years ago.

Additionally, the current CPS Sexual Education curriculum and online guide demonstrate significant gaps and a total lack of the thoughtful inclusion needed to ensure every student has the information they need. For example, the guide doesn’t mention sexual health and sexuality as they pertain to people with disabilities. All students, including those with disabilities, are entitled to educational information that goes beyond dominant normative standards.

As a member of the Board of Education, I will demand that Chicago Public Schools report, with full transparency, on the implementation of this policy, that a meaningful action plan is created, and that meaningful inclusivity is incorporated.

I believe this must be addressed from a number of angles and there are any number of underlying causes that drive chronic absenteeism – I will focus on one way I believe I can make a direct impact as a Board member.

Creating learning environments that are safe, loving, healthy, and where all children experience meaningful belonging is one critical component. Ensuring students and families are confident in our schools’ ability to respond to the mental health crisis our children currently face is an essential step in achieving that goal. We must ensure that our students and families know that mental health is protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act and have the right to access supports, accommodations, and to continue their learning uninterrupted during times of acute mental health crisis.

I will advocate to ensure that this perspective is included in our special education framework and be a vocal advocate with lived experience on this issue.

As a member of the Board, I would not only support the expansion of dual-enrollment programs but I would advocate for improvements to and reform of the CTE programs in CPS schools to help it realize its full potential. The goal should be that every high school student has the access, information, and training to pursue their chosen future pathway. The geography, racial, or economic demographics of a school should not pre-determine opportunity. Every student should have access to CTE programs specializing in Carpentry, Electrical work, Agriculture, HVAC and Welding, law, public safety, web development & design programming, and business and every student should have access to dual enrollment programs, college counselors & applications.

In addition to expanding these high school level programs, children all across the city should be introduced to the wide array of stable, fulfilling career options available in a rapidly changing economic and workforce landscape at a much younger age. Every year, elementary students are asked what they want to be. I would love to see more young children from all backgrounds encouraged to explore and excited to consider trade careers. This will require innovative and community-led partnerships with unions to co-create the best pathways and entry points for young people, rather than a top down decision from the Board. Implementing reform to increase equity in all post-secondary jump-start programs should be a collaborative conversation between the Board, individual schools, unions, students, parents and local business.

I do not believe that the Board of Education should dictate pedagogy or be tasked with assessing and evaluating curriculum – we have seen the negative consequences of these patterns before. I want students to have access to culturally relevant curriculum and firmly believe the best way to accomplish that is by ensuring our schools are staffed with culturally responsive educators.

Currently, the Board does not have a meaningful (or any) relationship with LSCs. I have been on our LSC for 8 years and have never interacted with a Board member directly or indirectly. This is truly mind-boggling to me. As a member of our LSC, I have incredible insight on the impact of broad, district-wide policies on individual schools. LSC members are elected and invested in our schools. I do not believe the Board should be passing any policies without giving LSCs meaningful opportunities to review and share the school level implications and possible unintended consequences.

As a member of the Board, I would create an LSC Policy Advisory Committee that any LSC members can join and where district-wide policies can be reviewed and understood through the local school level lens.

I believe in the principle of co-governance and feel strongly that Board members should seek out collaborative practices to understand and make decisions around issues like this. I am not a professional educator or education administrator but I have seen the ways that a principal can make or break a school community both inside and outside of the classroom. Decisions around autonomy and accountability for these roles must be built together with the professionals AND students and parents voices as well.

LSCs are essential to our schools and any candidate running for this office should have experience serving on one. These dedicated members of our school communities will be essential partners to our elected Board members and I hope that every member has an expansive plan for how to engage them.

I want to see the district invest resources in recruiting and retaining LSC members and assess the impacts of the current structure on schools that fall outside of the standard grade enrollment (like Albany Park Multicultural Academy which is the neighborhood school for my children for 7th and 8th grades only – the barriers to maintaining a quorum in a school like APMA must be addressed).

Lastly, having chaired our LSC during a principal selection process, the district must provide resources, translation services, and additional project management support that encourages more significant community engagement and supports the LSC members in building community and trust through the process.

Let me begin by saying that as a member of the Board of Education, I would fight to continue the moratorium on school closures and staunchly oppose any further school privatization efforts. I believe that each hyper-local community is best positioned to identify their needs and reimagine how these spaces can best serve those needs. I would propose a participatory model co-led by community members and executed in partnership with other city departments who can serve as key resources to execute on this vision.

The practice of out-sourcing school needs through vendor contracts with for-profit companies, in the name of financial efficiency, has been an unmitigated disaster. The process of submitting “change orders” through Aramark’s opaque system lacks any transparency or accountability and has left many of our schools in utter disrepair. The employees are subject to the anti-worker, profit-driven practices of a massive corporation.

We must rebuild an internal infrastructure for facilities maintenance and management. The staff in our school buildings should be unionized city employees supervised by our school principals.

Furthermore, the arbitrary and discretionary allocation of capital budget investments at the district level must be reformed. A full database of capital investments should be publicly available on the CPS website and all future decisions should be accompanied by a methodology for those decisions. Lastly, program-related new investments should not be directed from the facilities budgets.

CPS and the Board should also aggressively pursue TIF funds to maximize their capital budget revenue and ensure a more equitable use of those funds through dedicated investments in CPS facilities.

I believe this will be a critical area for new Board members to re-envision going forward. In the past, the Mayor would be negotiating said contracts and would have the legal and contractual power to commit resources from Chicago’s various departments like DFSS, public safety, public health, etc. Going forward, the CPS CEO and the Board of Education will have no authority over those parallel city services and resources. Board members will need to build substantial relationships across other city departments in order to develop meaningful relationships and secure productive partnerships.

As the elected and democratic body, the Board of Education will be best positioned to take on the mantle of the principles upon which collective bargaining (aka, collective good bargaining) was founded. I have extensive experience developing programs that are grounded in participatory practices, co-governance, mutual aid, and other movement based values. I believe we must center community accountability which requires a deep understanding of these concepts and a relentless commitment to meaningful community engagement. This office is ideal for meaningful implementation of community accountability because schools are physical anchors in our neighborhoods and natural centers for developing and building together within and across our schools.

The creation of an elected representative school Board is steeped in the hard-fought battle to create it and the work of educators, parents, and activists over the course of decades. Members of this Board will be community organizers, they will be advocates, and they will be coalition builders. I will be deeply committed to elevating student voice. I believe that Board members must be deeply committed to the best interests of CPS students; we are tasked with continuing the pursuit of our wildest dreams and highest aspirations for all our children – for moving us all closer to a future where every child can realize their full potential.

To me, gentrification and housing access is the most prevalent issue impacting the schools of District 2 (and beyond). At Hibbard Elementary, we have seen consistent declines in enrollment due to housing shifts – oftentimes, the purchase of a building by developers can be directly tied to the loss of 15 – 50 of our students at any given point in the year; and it is often children from the least economically privileged households. In the past two years, our enrollment has risen as we have been privileged to welcome families from Afghanistan, Venezuela, and other countries, but the underlying concern around enrollment drops remains. Ensuring that the new board members support and continue to do the work of implementing the needs-based funding model will be critical to ensuring every child has access to excellent schools.

Furthermore, because our non-citizen families will not be afforded a say in who represents their interests on the new School Board, it is a priority of mine throughout my campaign to listen to these vital voices in our communities and uplift their experience and concerns with the same weight and respect as the rest of our neighbors. After winning a seat on the School Board, continued engagement with the Non-Citizen Advisory Council will be a top priority of mine.