Armed with "Fight for Funding" picket signs, thousands of Chicago teachers walked out of their classrooms on Friday in a daylong work stoppage aimed at protesting inadequate financing for education and the lack of a contract.
Shortly after sunrise, picketing began at school buildings, giving nearly 400,000 students a forced day off in the cash-strapped Chicago Public Schools system, the nation's third-largest.
The job action, which Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration have characterized as illegal, was part of a multi-union, multi-pronged protest that also focused on the state's failure to fund social-service programs and public universities for the past nine months.
"The message today is all about funding for education and how we need to get the schools the money they need to run," said Wendy Pattis, a 21-year teacher who picketed outside Burr Elementary School on Chicago's near-northwest side.
Part of the school system's financial struggles stems from its inability to navigate around a nine-month state budget standoff between Rauner and Democrats controlling the state legislature. CPS' call for $480 million in state assistance to make a required June pension payment for teachers has gone unanswered.
Along Ashland Avenue, one of Chicago's busiest north-south thoroughfares, semi-trailer trucks and motorists in cars honked in support of Pattis and about 30 of her colleagues, some of whom had been bracing for a possible public backlash before the strike began.
The one-day walkout comes after teachers have worked without a contract since last July. The union cannot legally launch a longer strike until mid-May, when a fact-finding phase in negotiations concludes.
In February, the union rejected a four-year contract proposal from CPS, in part because of plans to make teachers shoulder more in pension premiums that the district had been paying.
"Instead of forcing our students to miss out on a day of learning, we need to work together to fix a broken state education funding system that penalizes poor and minority children in Chicago and around the state," CPS spokeswoman Emily Bittner said.
With a $1.1 billion deficit, the district also faces the possibilities of state funding cuts because of Illinois' unrelenting budget impasse and a state takeover pushed by Rauner, a Republican.
"Fix the budget crisis. Fund our schools. Fund our vital social services," shouted Jesse Sharkey, the union's vice president, during a rally at Roosevelt High School on Chicago's northwest side. "We're going to fight to win the schools our children deserve."
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