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Mayor's version of CPS budget is the one 'not tethered to reality...'

George N. Schmidt - July 17, 2012

Earlier today, on July 17, 2012, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, whose minions had declared as late as a month ago that everyone should wait for the results of the fact finding on the current contract negotiations between Chicago Public Schools and Chicago Teachers Union, went public in trying to undermine the expected fact finder's report (actually due out on July 18) stating for the public that the fact finder's report is "not tethered to reality."

Basically, to use a term Rahm would find comfortable, what the mayor is saying is bullshit.

It's Rahm's CPS budget — and its phony claims of a massive "deficit" that is not there and that will disappear once the final audit is in (sadly not until December 2013) — that has been untethered from reality beginning the day he stood at Kelly High School and announced that he was, basically, dumping everyone who knew anything about Chicago Public Schools and replacing everybody, from the seven members of the school board to the system's executive officers, with his minions. From Chief Executive Officer Jean-Claude Brizard through the seven members of the Chicago Board of Education to the dozens of administrators hired during the 14 months since Rahm began, CPS officials have been untethered because they have been under orders to follow whatever Rahm says and do whatever Rahm says to do.

And now everything is crashing down around them.

This is a mayor who can't even get his own schools chief (paid a quarter million dollars a year) to be at the bargaining table.

This is a mayor who stole more than $70 million from the schools at the first meeting of his school board, by escalating the costs for police services in the schools from $8 million to $70 million or more a year.

And more importantly at this point in history, this is the mayor whose school board has produced a proposed budget that is untethered from any previous realities, unavailable to the public, not subject to any public scrutiny, and headed into a tragedy of its own making. It was not for nothing that CPS held six hearings on the so-called "budget" at the same time at three separate locations on July 11, 2012. Nor is it for nothing that CPS has refused to print copies of the budget for the public, so that everything is on line and therefore can be tweaked daily to suit the whims of the mayor and his minions.

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