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When state legislators created Chicago’s elected school board, they also required the city’s mayor to name a noncitizen advisory board, meant to give people without citizenship a more formal voice in school board matters since they cannot vote or run in elections.
But about four months ahead of this year’s school board races — and 18 months after the city’s first elected members were seated — Mayor Brandon Johnson still hasn’t created that advisory panel.
“There is no clarity on this,” Socorro Diaz, a mother of three Chicago Public Schools graduates who is interested in serving on the panel, said in Spanish through a translator. “How is this going to be organized? Because education is too important.”
This year, Chicago will transition from a partially elected school board to a one that is fully elected. The election for all 21 school board seats is Nov. 3.
The panel is supposed to advise the Board of Education on various issues that impact noncitizen children, including on how to create an “inclusive learning environment” and more generally sharing perspectives from noncitizen families. State law maps out almost no instructions for the mayor: It doesn’t establish a deadline for the mayor to create the advisory board, the number of people to appoint, or even whether any of the picks must be immigrants or noncitizens.
For parents who had pushed for this board, its absence felt especially deep last fall during an intense federal deportation campaign in Chicago known as Operation Midway Blitz. At the time, the mayor’s office told Chalkbeat that it was finalizing applications for the advisory board, but it was figuring out how to protect people interested in participating without putting them in the crosshairs of the federal government.
That application still doesn’t exist. The mayor’s office did not answer a question about the status of the application, but in a statement last week, a spokesperson said they hope to create the board by the fall.
“Given the nature of recent immigration enforcement, the Mayor’s Office is working to develop a process that allows community members to participate safely and confidently,” said mayoral spokesperson Griffin Krueger.
Some parents have suggested the mayor’s office can appoint at least some people who may be citizens or legal residents but can still act as representatives for noncitizens.
Kids First Chicago, an education advocacy group that lobbied for the creation of the noncitizen advisory board, had pushed the mayor’s office last year to name the panel, especially as immigration enforcement kept families from sending their kids to school.
Claiborne Wade, a member of Kids First’s Fair Governance Task Force and parent of CPS students, said he can understand the mayor’s office’s concerns, especially with a federal government that is targeting immigrants and noncitizens.
Not having the panel in place, however, means that the board is potentially not hearing from certain immigrant communities whose kids are in CPS, who “do have a voice, too,” he said.
Diaz, who is currently on the Eric Solorio Academy High School Local School Council, first got involved in parent councils almost 25 years ago, when she learned that one of her daughters, at the time a 6-year-old newcomer from Mexico, was not receiving help in understanding English in school, she said. She recalled seeing her daughter set aside in a corner of her classroom, and Diaz repeatedly pushed the principal for help.
Since then she’s participated in LSCs and bilingual advisory councils, too, and believes it’s important for parents to get involved, she said.
When she learned about Chicago’s first school board elections, she felt a mixture of emotions: happiness that parents would get to choose who made policy decisions for the district but sadness that she and others who aren’t citizens wouldn’t be able to cast votes or run for office.
She feels the advisory panel is an advocacy vehicle for parents who can’t be at board meetings or are fearful of revealing their identities. To Diaz, it’s frustrating to not know what’s happening with the panel.
“They need to start being more transparent,” she said.
Reema Amin is a reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.
