MB

There are two things here. The 16 percent is really misleading. Sixteen percent over five years, considering how expensive Chicago is, is not a lot. There’s also a lot of potential of skyrocketing health care costs. They also talked a lot about the average teacher’s compensation, claiming it’s $100,000. But that teacher would have to be in their eleventh year currently, and right now, the attrition rate for educators is around three years — a lot of teachers leave after that. That’s been the trend. So I think that 16 percent was really not 16 percent at all.

But the more important aspect of this has been the work of people like [former union president] Karen Lewis, [current president] Jesse Sharkey, Stacey Davis Gates, our vice president. Stacy recently said, “No one got into this to be rich.” You have people who are incredibly selfless, a ton of people who care.

For us, it’s a historic moment. I get kind of emotional thinking about how we’re at the front and center where we’re talking about housing security, as part of our bargaining for the common good. That’s the more important thing. That’s why you had 94 percent authorize for a strike, and you had the House of Delegates [the union’s internal elected body] unanimously reject CPS’s contract offer, because so many of us realize that our kids are worth all of it — everything.

And teachers get it in our classrooms. We see the things that people don’t see, like the traumas students are bringing in, what it means when your students are hungry, what it means when your students are affected by a parent picking up a second job because the rent is getting ridiculous. Or what it means to have homeless students, 18,000 of them in CPS.

Trying to buy us off, trying to just tell us to just take the money was something that we recognized a mile away. Because it’s not about the money. I don’t know who they think we are, like we would take the money and forget about the kids. That’s not who we are.