Teachers Union Joins Pride Parade
Two years ago, a grammar school in the Boystown neighborhood became the first official Chicago Public School delegation to march in the city’s gay pride parade.
“I’ve been waiting for other public schools to jump in and no one has,” said Brad Rossi, a parent at Nettelhorst Elementary School, a CPS magnet cluster school located at the corner of Melrose and Broadway. “Each year, we’ve been waiting, thinking, ‘surely someone is going to join us next.’”
Rossi’s wait will end this year as another contingent from CPS is added to Sunday’s parade lineup—the Chicago Teachers Union.
For the first time ever, the CTU will be one of the more than 240 organizations marching in the 41-year-old parade. Dennis Bales, the chairman of the union’s GLBT committee, said the group’s participation was prompted by CTU president Karen Lewis, who was elected last summer.
“Our president personally initiated our involvement in the parade this year,” Bales said.
The CTU contingent will include teachers, students, parents and non-teaching staff from schools across the district, Bales said.
Two years ago, when the Nettelhorst group first marched, there were “rumblings of resistance from within the school,” Rossi said, when some families deemed the school’s participating as “totally inappropriate.”
“There’s still a discomfort with elementary schools and gay issues, that somehow it’s not appropriate to talk with kids about gay issues,” said Rossi, who is CPS high school teacher. Although Nettelhorst’s participation in the parade is not a school-sanctioned event, “it went from this hysteria to now it’s a done deal,” he said.
Last year, then-CPS CEO Ron Huberman, his partner and their daughter joined the Nettelhorst group.
So far, Bales said the CTU group has received nothing but support. More than 2,000 fliers have been distributed and each school’s union delegate notified of the event. Bales expects between 75 and 100 people to turn out and added that “everyone should be comfortable being him or herself.”
Rossi said he hopes the CTU’s parade appearance marks a broader acceptance of LGBT rights at CPS.
“We are making a statement that we support all of our teachers and by extension we support all of our students,” Rossi said. “I hope that it starts to send the signal to other schools that it is okay to [march in the parade].”
