Chicago Votes for a School Board President for the First Time Tuesday — and the Winner Inherits a Budget Built on Money That Has Not Arrived
Three candidates remain for a job that has never been elected before. Whoever wins takes office in January at the head of a district whose $9.88 billion budget counts on revenue that may never come, with a school-closures moratorium about to expire.
Buried in the middle of Tuesday's long ballot is a first: Chicago voters will elect a president of the Chicago Board of Education, a job that has always been appointed until now. Three candidates are actively campaigning for it. Jessica Biggs is a former CPS principal who now holds an elected board seat. Hilario Dominguez is a teacher and a former deputy political director of the Chicago Teachers Union. Victor Henderson is a defense attorney. A fourth name, Sendhil Revuluri, remains on the ballot after suspending his campaign. The president sets the board's agenda — and takes office in January at the head of the school district's government.
The three split most sharply on arithmetic. In July, the board narrowly approved a fiscal 2027 budget of roughly $9.88 billion, built to close a $732 million shortfall — and built, the Chicago Patriot's analysis noted, on revenue that has not yet arrived. Biggs voted against the budget measure that assumed additional state money and opposes the board's practice of taking the maximum annual property tax increase, pointing to her record as her credential. Henderson has taken the hardest fiscal line of the three, opposing any budget built on money that is not in hand. Dominguez supports the annual property tax increase and wants more state revenue, and his campaign emphasizes families and classrooms over the ledger.
Underneath the budget sits the question none of the three can defer for long. CPS lost about 11,500 students this fall, its lowest enrollment in more than two decades, and the district's moratorium on school closures expires at the end of this school year. Dominguez alone has committed to closing no schools and wants the moratorium extended; Biggs has rejected a repeat of the 2013 mass closures without ruling out case-by-case decisions. Their public emphases differ in kind as well: Biggs is vowing to focus on families and early childhood education, Dominguez is advocating universal pre-K, and Henderson says he wants to break away from politics in Chicago's schools.
Money has followed the race accordingly. Outside PACs and super PACs have spent $8.1 million across the school board races, more than a quarter of it aimed at Dominguez, and an October analysis by the Sun-Times and WBEZ found outside groups aligned against the teachers union have outraised the union roughly five to one. On Tuesday, Chicago decides which of the three inherits all of it — the budget, the buildings and the argument — as the first president its voters ever chose.
