CHICAGO (WLS) — On Wednesday afternoon, outgoing Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez presented a draft of the 2026 budget via Zoom, which he plans to distribute to schools on Thursday.
This proposed budget includes a tax increase but ensures that schools won’t experience funding cuts. However, it is contingent on an extra $300 million in funding that the district may not actually obtain.
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Principals are expected to get their school’s budgets from the CPS central office on Thursday. Nevertheless, doubts about the reliability of these figures have already emerged.
“We are ultimately the face of the district’s decisions, and our students deserve better,” said Kia Banks with the Chicago Principals & Administrators Association.
The needs of CPS students have never been bigger, according to officials who released a 2026 budget outline Wednesday that no longer includes federal COVID-19 pandemic funding and is being impacted by higher costs and inflation.
“We know we can balance the budget without raising taxes and without irresponsible borrowing,” Martinez said.
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“At this point, they’re so dug into their positions that reaching some sort of compromise or accommodation seems highly unlikely,” said David Greising, Better Government Associate president.
The best-case scenario released Wednesday is based on a $229 million dollar deficit assumption. It relies on receiving $300 million dollars in additional funding from either the state-or from the city, reimbursing it for the funds it currently looses as a result of TIFs.
“If the money is not obtained from Springfield, then the mayor, when he passes his budget this fall, can just easily make sure that CPS gets $600 million dollars in TIF revenue,” Martinez said. “Right now we’re getting $298 [million], which we’re grateful for, but if TIFs didn’t exist, we’d be getting $600 million.”
The Chicago Teachers Union has spoken in favor of such a strategy in the past, but the union that represents Chicago principals is already calling CPS’ budget figures “magical and false” in a letter to members.
“In a presentation by the lame-duck CPS administration, we were told our members would be required to waste their time and credibility by drafting budgets for next school year that are based on numbers CPS admits are off-likely by hundreds of millions of dollars,” the letter read in part. “These moves would paper over a budget deficit of more than $500 million, but they have not happened and are unlikely… CPAA members will be left to clean up the mess.”
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office shot down the suggestion outright, saying in part, “This is part of the same pattern of irresponsible and reckless budgeting under CEO Martinez that has led our school district into this fiscal position in the first place. There are serious issues at stake, and we cannot afford for the CEO to continue to put politics above the needs of our students.”
“To give us a budget… without a commitment that that budget will be fully funded, I think is very irresponsible,” Banks said.
By law, the Chicago Board of Education has to vote on and pass a balanced budget. That vote will likely happen sometime in August.
The problem is likely to fall to Martinez’s successor. His last day on the job is June 18.
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