Marathon talks to avert a threatened Monday teachers strike took a dramatic turn late Saturday when Mayor Richard Daley summoned the key players to his office.
The mayor called members of the Chicago Board of Education, the Chicago Teachers Union and the Chicago School Finance Authority to an emergency meeting in his City Hall office after 10 hours of negotiations had failed to produce an agreement.
Daley was shuttling among the three groups, which were ensconced in different rooms in his fifth-floor office, according to Avis LaVelle, the mayor`s spokeswoman.
For most of the day, it appeared that the school board and the union were inching closer to a deal. But later, union spokeswoman Jackie Gallagher said union President Jacqueline Vaughn was upset that the board had not
significantly sweetened its initial offer of a one-time bonus for teachers. Terms of that offer were not disclosed.
”Our team was disgusted and fed up,” she said. ”What sounded (Friday)
night like a good exchange started losing any zip.”
Gallagher said Vaughn told her shortly before the meeting in the mayor`s office, ”I`ve just about had it.”
Daley called the meeting as the union and the board were trying to resolve a dispute over a pay raise before midnight Saturday, which was the deadline Vaughn had set to terminate the union`s contract with the board. That action would cost the school system at least $50 million this year and worsen its financial condition.
”I just want everyone to realize what can happen and maybe go back and sit down realistically and work out an agreement,” Daley said. ”Everybody has to give a little bit-the School Finance Authority, the Chicago Board of Education and the union.”
On Saturday afternoon, union Vice President Thomas Reece told reporters that the board had boosted its initial offer, which was made late Friday. Sources said the proposal hinged on last-minute concessions by the School Finance Authority, which has steadfastly rejected a board request to use $35 million in state money that won`t become available until the next fiscal year. Though members of the finance authority, which must approve the school system`s annual budget, insisted that they wouldn`t ease restrictions on the state funds, member David Heller said they may approve budget cuts that could provide savings as the year progresses.
Neither Schools Supt. Ted Kimbrough nor Vaughn would say how much money the new offer involved, but Kimbrough said the board would have to make ”some very difficult cuts at the school sites” to pay for the proposal.
”There`s nowhere else we can cut,” Kimbrough said, raising the possibility that educational programs, school supplies or building repairs could be affected.
”We`re in that mode where we`re going to be very, very draconian in what has to happen here,” he said.
Board critics, including Daley, maintain that the board should make further cuts in its administrative staff before curtailing classroom services. Vaughn had threatened to terminate the union`s contract with the board at midnight Friday, a move that would deny the school system access to at least $50 million in teacher pension funds and make its financial plight more desperate.
But after the new offer was made, Vaughn said she would delay termination of the contract for at least another day so negotiations could continue.
”After 23 sessions, the board made an offer,” she said, smiling.
The board`s move came after two days of exhaustive intervention by Daley, who Friday summoned the board`s 15 members and teacher union officials to separate meetings at his City Hall office.
He urged both sides to compromise and spare the city`s 400,000 public school students another disruptive strike, which would be the 10th in the last 22 years.
”We`re going to do everything we can to avoid a strike,” board President Clinton Bristow said after meeting with the mayor Friday. ”We`re going to look at a number of different possibilities.”
Besides its strike threat, the teachers union wields another powerful weapon in its negotiations with the board.
In the three-year contract signed in September 1990, the union agreed to let the board borrow $50 million a year from its pension fund. Canceling the contract would cut the board off from that badly needed money.
The union insists the loans were intended to fund annual 7 percent pay raises for the system`s 26,000 teachers, but this year the board has budgeted the money for other purposes.
Earlier on Friday, the finance authority, which must approve the school system`s budget, again rejected pleas from the board and the union that $35 million in future state reimbursements be counted in this year`s budget.
The $35 million will not become available to the board until next summer, and the finance authority contends allocating it this year would only exacerbate the system`s long-term financial crunch.
The board has projected a deficit of $178 million next year, and counting the $35 million against this year`s expenses would only increase next year`s deficit by that amount, according to the authority. The authority was created in 1980 after years of deficit spending drove the school system into bankruptcy.
”I care about the children, but I am not going to be a party to a school system going into insolvency,” said Heller, one of the five members of the authority. ”Some group has to say enough is enough.”
Daley, the teachers union and many school-reform activists insist that the board can cut deeper into its budget to come up with a last-minute raise for teachers and avert a strike.
Earlier in the week, Daley accused the board of lacking the courage to make the difficult budget decisions that could free up money for raises. ”I can`t give them what they need: guts,” he said.
Beginning on Wednesday, Daley called in a parade of players key to strike-prevention efforts, including state lawmakers, members of the finance authority and school-reform advocates.
But as the week wore on, it remained unclear just what rabbit the mayor was hoping to pull out of a hat to avert a walkout.
Two weeks ago, he had supported a measure in the Illinois General Assembly that would have forced the finance authority to free up the $35 million in exchange for expanded oversight authority over the school board for another 12 years.
And at one point last week, he appeared to be working toward a compromise with the members of the legislature`s black caucus, who had blocked the measure on the grounds that Daley and Gov. Jim Edgar were attempting a racist ”power grab” by diminishing the power of the reform-era school board.
At the same time, Daley kept up the pressure on the school board, for which he has expressed bitter scorn in the past. And when the finance authorty held firm in its opposition to shifting the $35 million, the board found itself on the hot seat, which is exactly where some observers thought Daley wants them to be.
For one thing, the mayor hopes to insulate himself as much as possible from blame if a strike takes place, and having the board perceived as incompetent or irresponsible suits that objective.
But the mayor`s strategy could run even deeper than that. If a strike occurs, it could cost the board the only real support it enjoys, from parents and community activists involved in the school-reform movement.
Those people originally nominated the list of candidates from which Daley selected the 15 board members. And their continued support for the board has given it a surprising degree of immunity from City Hall pressure.
But a strike, especially a protracted one, could undermine parental allegiance to the board, leaving Daley in a stronger position to exert his influence on board policies.
He could even press the argument that the current method of selecting the board is fatally flawed and should be abandoned because it results in a board that is too large and too inexperienced to be effective.
”I don`t want to do that,” the mayor told reporters Friday. ”These 15 people have worked very, very hard.”
But if a strike provoked a noisy outcry, Daley could then claim he is simply responding to public demands to make things better.
