School Board Approves Record Salaries for CPS Leaders
A week after Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s hand-picked Board of Education voted against granting teachers a 4 percent contractual pay raise, the panel approved raises for CEO Jean Claude Brizard and other top Chicago Public Schools executives.
Brizard received an increase of 8 percent, to $250,000, and five other top officials received raises ranging from 1.5 percent to nearly 30 percent. The six-figure salaries are the highest ever at CPS.
Board president David Vitale said the salary increases were not raises.
“We didn’t give any raises today, we hired people at competitive salaries,” he said.
Teachers, who showed up in droves for the monthly meeting, sharply criticized the pay increases.
“It’s obscene,” said Lucky Moliviatis, a history teacher at Farragut Career Academy. “These aren’t educators.”
Brizard will be the first CPS CEO with a performance-based contract. However, the bonuses, worth up to 15 percent of his salary, will be awarded at the Board’s discretion, rather than having an explicit connection to the goals outlined.
Preliminary state test scores were also presented at the meeting, but officials did not provide data until late in the day, more than an hour after the meeting adjourned. The preliminary results show an overall increase in state scores, with 73.3 percent of students meeting or exceeding standards, up from 69.5 percent last year. But the percentage of students exceeding standards remained low, just 17.1 percent, up from 14.7 percent last year.
Hundreds of people protested outside the CPS administration building at 125 S. Clark St., where the meeting was held, and others signed up to speak about the school district’s more than $700 million deficit. Kurt Hilgendorf, an American history and economics teacher at John Hope High School, said the district inflated the cost of the teachers’ 4 percent raises, which it estimated at almost $100 million.
Last week, CPS adjusted their projected deficit from $720 million to $712 million and included millions of dollars in previously undisclosed costs. Officials allotted $135 million for additional contractual raises based on education and experience, but according to Hilgendorf—and the district’s most recent comprehensive annual financial report—salary raises across CPS cost $66 million on average.
The Chicago News Cooperative reported last week that CPS had as much as $150 million of federal stimulus money available. Roughly $100 million of that must be allocated to programs by the end of this month according to federal guidelines and CPS spokeswoman Becky Carroll said the district plans to use it on summer programming.
Most of the people who spoke at the board meeting disputed the district’s deficit figures and called on the Board to open up the books.
