Jessica Biggs (District 6)
Section 1 - Basic Information & General Questions
Candidate's Name Jessica Biggs
District 6
Campaign link https://www.biggs4chicago.com/
Are you a current or recent CPS parent, grandparent, or guardian/caregiver? CPS parent
Are you a CPS graduate? No
Have you ever served on a Local School Council (LSC)? Yes
Have you ever served on a Parent Advisory Committee (PAC)? Yes
Have you ever served on a Bilingual Advisory Committee (BAC)? No
Have you ever served on a Community Action Council (CAC)? Yes
Have you ever worked in a CPS school? Yes
How long have you lived in the district you are running to represent? 13 years
Describe your CPS experience.
My connection to CPS is broad and deep; not only am I a parent of a CPS student–a 5th Grader at Galileo Scholastic Academy, but I was an award winning principal at Edmund Burke Elementary School from 2012 to 2018 and a Resident Principal at Canter Middle School from 2011 to 2012. Today, I work as a community leader and organizer with the Southwest Organizing Project (SWOP) building systems of partnership between CPS neighborhood schools, healthcare, behavioral health and community-based organizations that work to support the holistic needs of students and families.
Why are you running for the Board of Education?
I am a CPS parent, so I have a significant stake in the success of the system. I am also an experienced educator. I was a special education teacher and then a Principal at CPS's Burke Elementary. During my tenure at Burke, student performance increased dramatically and the school was taken off probation. Today, I work as an organizer building systems of partnership between schools, healthcare, behavioral health and community-based organizations that work to support the holistic needs of students and families. I believe that we need leaders with relevant and diverse on-the-ground experience making decisions about our schools. This is a pivotal moment in Chicago’s history, and I want the best for my daughter and every CPS student. Our kids deserve so much more!
What is the most pressing challenge our district is facing?
Equitable school funding is essential to addressing all other educational issues. We must ensure that every school has the resources to provide strong, equitable learning environments for all students, including special education and bilingual learners. This is a fundamental responsibility and must always remain a priority. The first step to ensure equitable funding is guaranteeing there is sufficient funding. To this end, I believe that we need to work with our state legislators to fully fund the State’s Evidence-Based Funding Formula. Just as important as the total size of the pie is how it is divided. I support the use of CPS’s Opportunity Index to ensure that all of our schools are adequately and equitably funded. However, with any new blanket formula we need to investigate the impact of its implementation to ensure that no students are left out. Metrics need to be added to ensure that specialty programming is available where schools or communities seek it. Strong schools mean strong communities and every neighborhood in Chicago deserves a strong school.
Section 2 - Board Responsibilities & Commitments
How will you interact with CPS students and families in your district to ensure that the voices of the most impacted are heard and understood?
As democratic representatives of the community, every school board member must align their vision for the schools with that of the community they represent. I intend to take a two pronged approach. First, I will always seek out the views of community members and community-based organizations (CBO’s). I will do through monthly District 6 convenings in which LSC members, CBO’s and other stakeholders will be invited into a collaborative space to share successes and challenges and learn from the work of one another. As an equal participant in these convenings, I too will be able to listen and learn, as well as share the work of the Board. Second, I aim to hold learning walks in District 6 schools with parents and community members to learn first-hand about the experience of students, teachers and principals. I aim to facilitate these learning walks to develop common understandings about the work in our schools and to anchor decision making in the experience of those most impacted. Additionally, I will attend community meetings throughout the district and practice an open door policy for those who wish to talk with me. Taken together, I can ensure that folks have ample opportunity to share their vision with me.
What specific actions will you take to address and repair the historical harms within Chicago Public Schools, and how will you ensure that students, parents, and educators are actively engaged in the healing and trust-building process?
Chicago Public Schools is a system deeply burdened by historical harm and pain. I will continue to work tirelessly to build a better, more just system. This starts with building trust. Much of the way that I intend to engage with parents and community, as I have outlined above, will provide opportunities for bi-directional communication and relationship building. It will be critical that I am consistent in listening and alignment of action in order to begin to build the sort of trust necessary that might work to enable healing.
The District’s implementation of the Opportunity Index and the move away from Student Based Budgeting is a good first step to ensure equitable funding and programming options for students and schools historically disinvested in. Without full and fair funding, we cannot hope to achieve equity in opportunity. I will also fully support building the infrastructure to support the implementation of the work of the Office of Black Student Success and the Black Student Success Plan. I intend to be always vigilant to ensure that I am not perpetuating systems of injustice and I will work in partnership with my constituents to deconstruct those that continue to exist.
What is your understanding of the Board’s relationship with Local School Councils? How will you collaborate with LSCs in your district?
The relationship between LSCs and the Board should be collaborative. No one understands the needs of their local schools better than those in community with their schools. I will collaborate with LSCs on the development of policies that will impact their respective schools. I take parent and student collaboration and authentic voice in decision making very seriously. CPS exists to serve the interests of its students and families. As described, I intend to hold monthly convenings of Local School Council chairs (who are parents) such that LSC chairs are able to share their work and their challenges. By creating open lines of communication we can learn from each other’s experiences, recognize common interests, and opportunities for collaboration.
List the Board committees you intend to join and describe any new Board committees you will propose.
I see myself serving on the Whole Child and Workforce/Equity committees. When we talk about intersectionality we are really talking about the whole individual: from their identities to positionality and everything in between. I would see my work on the Whole Child committee as providing for all the nuances of our children’s education, from whether they need additional services through an IEP, mental health supports, or housing assistance. I will propose the creation of at least two new committees: Student Transportation and School Culture.
How will you prioritize your time to ensure you give your role on the Board of Education the attention it deserves?
I am lucky to have a job as an organizer that in many ways prioritizes relationship building, community-convening and collective decision making. I am also lucky to have a fair amount of flexibility in schedule to allow for compartmentalized focus on Board work.
Section 3 - Budget & Facilities
What are your thoughts on the current proposed district budget for SY24-25? As a board member, where would you look to increase funding and where would you make budget cuts?
Broadly I support the approved 2024-25 budget. That being said I am deeply concerned about the long term structural deficit that CPS is facing. I would transition from a capital budget that grows and shrinks dramatically each year to a capital budget that provides for steady investments in CPS. By providing a consistent and predictable sum for the capital program we can drive down the unit costs for every investment we make. This would allow us to achieve the same state of repair at a lower cost freeing up more resources for new projects. I would increase funding on student facing services, with a particular emphasis on transportation and special education. I would like to see efficiencies within CPS central office and contracted services.
Funding for CPS is in a particularly precarious situation due to state shortages to Evidence-Based Funding (EBF), the end of pandemic funding, and more. What would you prioritize when facing these overwhelming budget realities?
Advocating in Springfield and with the governor’s office to ensure that the Evidence-Based Funding formula is fully funded. We have to expand the pie to include all of the dollars that are owed to Chicagoans before we can decide how we divide the pie.
What experience do you have with complicated budgets?
As a former CPS principal, I have seven years experience managing complex education budgets. Those seven years included the same sort of budget crisis that we are facing now. This makes me uniquely positioned to learn from the mistakes of the past. I seek to balance the budget without causing the severe pain and irreparable damage caused in 2013. We cannot and must not repeat those mistakes.
What will you do to ensure equitable and transparent funding for neighborhood schools?
I support the use of CPS’s Opportunity Index to ensure that all of our schools are adequately and equitably funded. However, with any new blanket formula we need to investigate the impact of its implementation to ensure that no students are left out. Metrics need to be added to ensure that specialty programming is available where schools or communities seek it. Strong schools mean strong communities and every neighborhood in Chicago deserves a strong school.
Many parents have expressed an urgent need for capital improvements in their schools. What steps will you take to ensure that schools have functioning facilities, particularly bathrooms and water fountains?
I will work to ensure that the CPS capital program ends the deferred maintenance backlog and prioritizes necessities. Further, I intend to distribute capital funding more equitably than CPS currently does. In the current system we construct new schools that cost $100s of millions, meanwhile some schools have barely functioning toilets from the 1960s and others have leaky roofs. This isn’t to say that I don’t think every community deserves a gorgeous new school; I think every community does. I hope for a world where we can build every neighborhood a gleaming, modern new school. Unfortunately, that is not the financial reality we live in right now.
Bussing challenges have a long and fraught history in CPS. The last few years have been particularly difficult for special education students, as well as those who attend magnet and selective enrollment schools. Given CPS’s recently announced plans for the coming school year, How do you plan to address the ongoing school bussing challenges and ensure that all students have reliable, safe, and equitable transportation to and from school?
We must restore bussing for all students who need it. To accomplish this, we need to hire bus drivers. You can’t bus kids if there is no one to drive the bus. I view the problem as a labor market issue that can be addressed through the following solutions:
We will simplify the application process. You should be able to apply and schedule an interview within 24 hours. Bus drivers are in demand, we need to hire them as soon as we identify that they are a good fit. Anything less and they may go somewhere else. After they are offered the job, we need to expedite the background check process. Ideally we will be paying them while they go through their pre-onboarding and onboarding processes. Their pay should be contingent on them completing the process and being staffed. By taking on CPS’s overly bureaucratic, time consuming, complicated, and expensive application process we can tackle the friction that causes people not to apply and to attrit during onboarding; We need to do everything we can to get these folks in the door.
We must work to increase the supply of people trained for the job by funding Commercial Driver’s Licensure and offering both coursework and the exam in Spanish and English.
Lastly, we have to make the job attractive. We can do this by offering signing bonuses, raising wages to match or exceed the pay levels in suburban districts, the CTA and private CDL employers. Instead of viewing bussing as a service that can be cut to make room for other needs, I will treat it as a necessity deserving of time and financial resources.
I also support expanding transportation options for families. I would like to see the district provide free Ventra cards to all students. We should be enabling all students to take the most desirable mode of transit to school. Sometimes that might be a school bus, other times older students might prefer to take the train if that is a faster mode.
Section 4 - Educational Programs & Academic Success
How do you define a quality education?
A quality education is one that equips students with a strong sense of identity and belonging along with all of the necessary skills to go into the world and take whatever path they choose.
What is the role of the Board of Education in ensuring quality educational programs for all students regardless of their background, zip code, or school type?
This is emphatically the role of the Board. If we aren’t ensuring students access to quality schools regardless of their background, zip code, or school type then we are failing.
What are your views on the roles of neighborhood, selective enrollment, magnet, and charter schools within CPS? Please address each type of school in your answer.
I support investing resources in neighborhood schools to guarantee that every student has an exceptional local school to attend. HOWEVER, we cannot underfund our district’s magnet and selective enrollment schools in order to adequately and equitably fund our neighborhood schools. For far too long, neighborhood schools that serve predominantly Black and brown students have been inadequately funded. I support the current decision to move away from per-pupil funding and return to a core funding model that ensures every school has the core and necessary staff to support its student body and provide a full range of “specials” or enrichment programming, including those specials unique to specialty and magnet schools. With respect to charter schools, we need to support the district’s 58,000 students who have chosen and are enrolled in charters. I do not support diverting additional public money to support charter growth, nor do I support maintaining charters that have been shown to consistently underperform. We have a responsibility to support our students who currently attend charter and contract schools, and we must not disrupt the education of students who are currently enrolled.
How should the Board approach charter oversight and accountability?
Charters should be judged by the same standards that every other public school is judged by. However, because of the independent budgetary authority of charters there needs to be additional transparency and attention paid to how charter networks expend their public money.
The initial recommendations of the Black Student Success Working Group were shared earlier this summer. Which of those recommendations will be most important to incorporate into the district’s strategic plan and why?
Incorporating culturally responsive curriculum and instruction is foundational to ensuring Black Student Success and the goals of the working group. This must be incorporated as a priority in the district’s strategic plan.
How will you work to ensure special education assessments and placements are more timely and equitable?
In too many cases, we engage in a “wait and fail” model before providing students the support and intervention they need. Every CPS school needs to have strong multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) structures that provide support and intervention from the moment students or parents indicate a need. This, however, cannot be a replacement for timely assessment and placement when needed. Every school must be equipped with a case manager (or multiple if the size of the student body requires) to ensure timely assessment and placement of students with disabilities.
What should the Board board do to guarantee students are receiving all of their required IEP minutes?
Fundamentally, this is a staffing issue. In order to guarantee that students receive all of their required IEP minutes and related services, we must have adequate staff to deliver those minutes. Currently, we have a shortage of special education teachers, paraprofessionals and related service providers. I support implementing career ladder models to move interested parents and community members into certification programs to become paraprofessionals and that we fund the certification process. Additionally, I support the expansion of residency models that enable paraprofessionals and general education teachers pursuing additional certification to teach with support while pursuing that certification.
In 2021, even before the recent influx of asylum seekers, the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) put CPS on a corrective action plan because the district was out of compliance with bilingual education requirements. To date, CPS still fails to staff bilingual programs and certified bilingual teachers at all schools that need them. What steps would you advocate for the district to take to solve this problem?
This problem has two causes, insufficient prioritization of resources to ELL students and a shortage of teachers with the ESL endorsement. I will solve the former by raising the value we put on a quality education for ELL learners. Right now, the Board treats it as something that would be nice, rather than a necessity. I will treat ESL education as the necessity that it is. With respect to the staff shortage, I will support funding the coursework needed to achieve bilingual certification and offering test-in opportunities for multilingual speakers. This would allow people to achieve temporary licensure more quickly as they work toward more permanent certification. Additionally, we have many parents who are bilingual speakers; we should consider ways to hire them in support roles to supplement core bilingual instruction. For parents, especially those who have recently arrived, CPS is often deeply challenging to navigate. I support providing navigators, who are fluent in each individual’s native languages, to help them chart their course through the system.
How would you advocate for the reinstatement of comprehensive art, music, and library programs to our schools?
Education is more than writing, reading, and arithmetic. We must provide every student with comprehensive art, music, and library programs. I will advocate for this programming by making it clear that these programs are more than optional programs that “would be nice” but necessities that we must provide universally.
Section 5 - School Culture
What do you believe is the role of the Board in fostering a culture of belonging for every CPS student?
If our students don’t feel that they belong in and are embraced by our schools we will be unable to build the high performing system that we all want. Since the job of the Board is to provide all CPS students with an excellent education, then it is emphatically the Board’s job to foster a culture of care and belonging in every school. I believe that each school should be equipped with a counselor, a social worker, a restorative justice facilitator and a school culture coordinator to meaningfully support students’ wellbeing and the development of a positive school culture in every school.
What are specific steps you will propose to increase in-school mental health support for our children?
We must diligently care for our students’ mental health. This means ensuring that our schools are the safe, supportive community anchors our kids and families deserve by properly funding and staffing school-based mental health resources and facilitating partnerships with community-based organizations to provide holistic wrap-around services for families. In today’s CPS mental health resources are rationed and even the students with the greatest needs often don’t receive the support they need. I will move us in the direction of a system where every student who needs care gets whatever care they need. This is an expensive endeavor; which is why I support leveraging FFS Medicaid reimbursements and the corresponding federal match to help augment the funds CPS has available to take care of students’ mental health needs. We shouldn’t be leaving money on the table.
What policies do you propose to help stop bullying in CPS schools?
Foster positive school cultures where all students feel embraced and supported. Expand access to mental health resources both in school and through community partnership. And view bullying as a symptom of a larger issue in the students' life that prioritizes support for both students' harmed and the perpetrators of that harm. Peace circles that are used both proactively to build relationships between students and reactively to address and repair harm are exceptionally useful in this endeavor. Additionally, social worker mediated behavioral supports and collaboration with the family to provide comprehensive supports should be employed.
What specific steps will you take to address and reduce racial bias in our schools, both in terms of pedagogy, curriculum, and disciplinary practices?
I will approach every decision I make on the Board through the lens of racial justice. I support training for staff to recognize and eliminate internal biases, bonuses and fully funded graduate education for underrepresented staff, navigators for ELL parents and a strong push to hold schools accountable for reducing instances of exclusionary and overly punitive discipline. Further, every student should have access to culturally relevant curricula. We need to fully and thoughtfully implement the recommendations of the Black Student Success Committee.
Students who report sexual assault and violence in CPS schools often feel that their voices are not heard. What is your approach to ensuring meaningful accountability and what will you do to ensure that this type of violence stops?
We must treat victims of sexual assault and violence with the utmost care and seriousness. This means training adults to listen to survivors. We can’t have a school system where student reports of violence are written off and ignored. Every report must be treated with gravity and investigated with speed. I support enhanced professional training for all mandatory reporters that emphasizes their obligations under the law and responsibility as humans to the children in their care.
How do you plan to ensure that LGBT+ students are protected and supported in CPS, both in anti-discrimination policy and inclusive curricula?
No matter which part in LGBTQIA+ a student identifies as, we must protect and support them the same. I would like to see CPS go beyond what the state mandates in providing for a safe educational environment for our LBGTQIA+ students including a comprehensive curricula that treats LGBTQIA+ studies as a valuable subject in its own right. I recognize that because of the historically disprivileged nature of members of the LGBTQIA+ community, LGBTQIA+ students have needs that can be very different from other students. I support creating a task force that brings students, academics, teachers, and administrators together to chart a course towards a district that gives LGBTQIA+ students everything they need to succeed emotionally, socially and academically.
Is there anything you would change about the recently adopted Whole School Safety plan? What can the Board do to ensure its implementation?
The culture of our schools needs to reflect care, joy, community and safety. We don’t do this by policing our students or being punitive in our discipline. Rather we achieve safety through thoughtful facilitation of relationship building between students and between staff and students. Building and sustaining these relationships requires adequate resources. Each school should be equipped with a counselor, a social worker, along with a restorative justice or school culture coordinator to meaningfully support students’ wellbeing. I take the Whole School Safety plan seriously and I would like to see it implemented in its most expansive form.