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The four candidates for Chicago Board of Education president met Tuesday for a live WTTW forum, where they discussed how they’d govern if Chicagoans pick them in the Nov. 3 election.
During the forum moderated by WTTW reporter Brandis Friedman, candidates Jessica Biggs, Hilario Dominguez, Victor Henderson, and Sendhil Revuluri also defended themselves against past allegations or criticism.
The candidates are running for the city’s first fully elected school board, responsible for hiring and evaluating the district’s CEO, adopting a budget plan, and setting district policy. The board president sets meeting agendas and breaks tie votes.
Biggs is a current school board member; Dominguez is the former deputy political director for the Chicago Teachers Union; Henderson is an attorney and a board member for Urban Prep Charter School; and Revuluri is a former member of the Chicago Board of Education under former Mayor Lori Lightfoot.
Perhaps the most popular question of the night came from 17-year-old Vaughn Webster, a senior at Ogden International High School who was sitting in the audience, reflecting on what many voters will consider this fall: “Why should I trust that you will act in my best interest and my peers’ best interest, and how should we hold you accountable if you fail to represent those interests?”
Here are four highlights from the forum.
On the student’s question around trust
Friedman asked Dominguez and Henderson to respond to Vaughn’s question. Both advised Vaughn and his peers to stay engaged in school board discussions.
Dominguez recalled when, as a CPS high schooler around 2010, he walked out in protest of budget cuts.
“I expect the same type of accountability,” Dominguez said. “I expect you all to walk out and protest if you think you have to, and meet me at the door to hold me accountable.”
Henderson said that getting demands fulfilled in a democracy requires being an “active participant.”
“If you want to see CPS provide the best education possible, then you and your classmates and your parents and your teachers and your principals and everybody in this room needs to stand up and step up and make sure that that happens,” Henderson said.
How to handle CPS’s challenging finances
The candidates had distinct opinions about how to tackle CPS’s recurring budget deficits.
Biggs highlighted her vote against the board’s decision this summer to adopt a budget that assumes CPS will receive another $150 million in state funds that isn’t guaranteed. She said it’s “really important” to keep pushing the state and city for support, “but we simply cannot budget with money that we don’t have.”
Dominguez, who supported the board’s decision to assume it will get the additional money, said he’d fight for more state funding and progressive tax revenue increases.
“I believe the job of school board president isn’t to predict that Springfield will say no — I believe the job of the school board president is to fight and make sure that Springfield will say yes,” he said.
Henderson said he doesn’t believe CPS’s budget figures “at all” and wants outside financial experts to analyze how the district spends its money. He said he wouldn’t support a tax increase until Chicagoans know “that CPS is spending the money that it gets properly.”
Revuluri said the budget was crafted poorly this year because he believes it was more focused on appeasing unnamed special interests. He said it should start with student needs “because too many of our students are receiving an impoverished education,” Revuluri said.
On closing schools
A resolution calling for no school closures will expire by the end of this school year. CPS enrollment has dropped by about 70,000 students during the past decade.
Biggs, Henderson, and Revuluri did not rule out school closures, while Dominguez did.
Biggs, a former principal whose South Side elementary school escaped closure in 2013, said she saw how other nearby closures sewed distrust among families.
“We cannot repeat a topdown, mass closure experience because it does not create the sort of system that I believe we need to move forward …. it’s the district’s responsibility to organize itself and to support the desires and the needs that communities express,” she said.
Dominguez cited recent research that found gun violence increased in neighborhoods surrounding closed schools. He suggested that Chicago should repurpose unused school space, such as for health clinics or food pantries.
Henderson said he’s not for or against closures; rather, he supports having the “hard conversations.”
“The first place you got to go to is the people in that area,” Henderson said. “What would you like to see? What do you think? How would you like to see us proceed?”
Revuluri said that the district currently has “too many schools that are too empty to give kids a quality educational experience.”
Students in small schools tend to have reduced access to a variety of courses and extracurricular activities, a Chalkbeat and Propublica investigation found.
On their past controversies
Friedman, the moderator, asked each candidate to respond to questionable issues in their pasts.
Biggs was fired from her principal job in 2018 after the district’s inspector general found students were marked tardy even if they missed too much of the school day and that she instructed staff to take students to school without proper paperwork. The matter also was raised during her successful 2024 campaign.
Biggs said she believes her firing was retaliation for speaking out against a controversial CPS custodial contract and the denial of special education services for many students. She noted that outside counsel decided CPS should remove her from its do-not-hire list last year.
Dominguez faced a campaign finance complaint in July from the Revuluri campaign, which alleged the Dominguez campaign had not properly reported donations or expenditures. One day after Chalkbeat reported the complaint, Dominguez’s campaign filed more than $44,000 in in-kind contributions from the CTU, his primary backer.
Dominguez said his campaign is in full compliance, and the complaint was withdrawn. Revuluri said it was withdrawn because they learned the matter wouldn’t be addressed until late October, “and honestly, we have better things to do.”
Henderson responded to allegations his ex-wife made in divorce filings years ago that he had physically abused one of his sons multiple times. Henderson did not deny the allegations Tuesday night but said he loves his children, and the judge at the time didn’t change “anything for me, in terms of parenting.”
“When it was necessary for me to have guardrails because my kids weren’t doing the things that they should have done, and I did that with love,” Henderson said.
Revuluri was asked about his time on the board during the pandemic, when the board authorized the use of billions of dollars in federal COVID relief dollars. Some financial experts have criticized the district’s reliance on the temporary federal dollars for recurring expenses, such as hiring thousands of additional staffers, which has helped exacerbate the district’s current financial challenges. Revuluri said he asked more questions at the time, including what these investments would look like when the money ran out.
Reema Amin is a reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.
