Cold Shutdown

Chicago's teachers walk out

The thermometer read 10DEG F as 3,000 teachers gathered last week in Chicago's downtown Daley Center to jeer at politicians, bankers and the insolvent Chicago board of education. On one demonstrator's placard was a photograph of Mayor Jane Byrne ringed menacingly by a bull's-eye target. Snapped a teacher: "I'm too angry to feel the cold." Others were out in the cold too: the city's 473,000 public school students. With most of their teachers taking part in what the 26,000-member Chicago Teachers Union called a "constructive lockout," all but a handful of the kids stayed away from their classrooms. All last week the nation's third largest public school system (after New York and Los Angeles) remained virtually shut down.

The teachers took their action only after enduring four delayed paydays, including a payless Christmas recess. Joan Morgan, 35, a first-grade teacher, put it succinctly: "I'm not going back until they pay me all my money." Early in the week that prospect seemed dim. On a local television show, the mayor, the president of the school board, the city's top financial adviser, the head of the teachers' union and a key city councilman--all of whom must cooperate to lead the school system out of financial chaos--engaged in a shouting match punctuated with name calling and charges of lying. The performance threatened to undermine further the credibility of the city's leaders in the eyes of the financiers whose help is so desperately needed. Said one distressed viewer: "The only hope for the schools is to get this tape destroyed before anyone from Moody's or Standard & Poor's sees it."

Despite echoing corridors and almost empty classrooms, School Board President Catherine Rohter ordered the schools to remain open; otherwise, the cash-poor system would have been billed for unemployment compensation. But pleas by board of education officials for parent volunteers to help with staffing were mostly unheeded. The few students who went to school watched movies or gathered in lunchrooms for daylong study halls, supervised by administrators. C.T.U. President Robert Healey advised parents: "Make plans for the week. Have your child read a book."

Later in the week the city council agreed to sell some $200 million in new financial notes, which should allow the board of education to meet past-due payrolls and fund school operations for as long as 90 days. By then, a long-term bailout plan, based on the anticipated sale of $500 million in new bonds, could be in place. Still, the future remains clouded by a demand of the newly created school finance authority that the board of education, which has already cut $60 million from its $1.4 billion budget, slice an additional $106 million by September 1981; these cuts will almost certainly require teacher layoffs and salary renegotiations. Both moves are opposed by the C.T.U.

Already blamed by teachers for allowing the confused school crisis to drag on for eleven weeks, Mayor Byrne seemed to be in for more trouble when the city's fire fighters walked out of contract negotiations and announced to confused Chicagoans that they would call a strike but "continue to man some equipment." Last week that was more than the teachers were willing to do.

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