In the past few weeks, Chicago Public Schools CEO Ron Huberman has called on parents, teachers, students, central office bureaucrats, and ordinary taxpayers to do their part to help the district erase a $900 million budget deficit: Teachers should forgo promised pay hikes. Students must do without sophomore sports. Coaches should be willing to coach for free. Class sizes are likely to swell. Taxpayers should expect higher bills.
How can CPS dole out raises while claiming to be cutting back? Let this be a lesson about the difference between a press release, disseminated far and wide for mass consumption, and a governing budget, buried on a Web site and read only by insiders and a few really motivated geeks.
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There are 53 departments, bureaus, or offices in the central schools bureaucracy, and the top remaining officials in every one—as well as many of their assistants—received raises, according to the budget.
Communications director Monique Bond is budgeted to make $130,000, up from $111,000 a year ago—that’s a 17 percent raise. Prior to following Huberman to CPS a little over a year ago, she was the spokeswoman for the city’s police department and before that the aviation department. Last December Reader media columnist Michael Miner reported on her reputation among journalists for making it hard to get information about the schools and wondered whether that’s what she’d been hired to do. I for one can attest that she does a pretty good job of blowing off my calls and e-mails.
Bond did get back to me when I left her a message about her boss’s salary. She said that while it’s true Huberman’s budgeted pay went way up, he’s voluntarily taking a pay cut in the form of unpaid furloughs. Therefore “he did not receive an increase,” Bond wrote in an e-mail. “His true salary as a result of the unpaid holidays and furlough days is $216,660, a 5.9 percent reduction in salary. The 5.9 percent reduction also applies to all Central Office employees making more than $50,000.” We’re taking her word on this, since she didn’t respond to my request for documentation of Huberman’s furloughs.
The budget also shows where the ax didn’t fall, including various departmental allowances set aside for unspecified “contractual services” covering everything from “telephone and telegraph” to “repair contracts.”
So if Huberman cut 500 employees and $200 million in June, why aren’t these cuts reflected in the official budget the board passed two months later?
