Hyde Park Herald: Jessica Biggs, former CPS principal and organizer, running for 6th District school board seat

This story was originally published by Hyde Park Herald.

Zoe Pharo, Hyde Park Herald

Aug 6, 2024 Updated Aug 8, 2024

Jessica Biggs, a former Chicago Public Schools (CPS) principal and a community organizer, is running for the 6th District school board seat to increase funding and retention of talent in the city’s public schools. 

With a long career in education, Biggs said she was motivated to run by the time she spent working to solve inequities in struggling schools as a special education teacher and principal, most recently as principal of Burke Elementary School in Washington Park. And, with a fifth-grader in CPS, Biggs said her daughter deserves “the very best from her school system, as does every single CPS student.” 

District 6 is a large and diverse area that spans parts of Old Town and Streeterville as well as Washington Park, Englewood and Hyde Park west of Woodlawn Avenue.

In many ways, Biggs told the Herald, such a sprawling map “lays bare the racial inequities of our city.” That said, she feels the schools across the district face fundamentally similar issues.

“Equity, access, funding, staffing, providing adequate resources to support the needs of whole children and families … I believe it’s important to see all of these issues as tied to one another and see our common goal as providing an excellent education to every single student in District 6,” Biggs said.  

If elected to the city’s first-ever elected school board, she plans to partner with Illinois legislators to help advocate in Springfield for more money for CPS to get the district adequately funded. Currently, most of the state’s contributions to schools is determined by an “evidence-based” model that allocates funding to districts based on their students’ level of need, but many districts still fall short of their financial needs. 

In July, the Chicago Board of Education passed a $9.9 billion budget for the upcoming school year, about one quarter of which is made up of state funding. But, according to state data released Monday, CPS needs another $1.2 billion to be considered “adequately funded.”

(Chalkbeat Chicago reported Monday that 49 of Illinois’ 430 school districts are still below 70% adequately funded this year; Chicago is estimated to be about 79% adequately funded.)

Biggs also wants to work with the governor’s office and CPS’ talent office to implement staffing and retention models to better address what she called CPS’ “staffing crisis.” 

In June, CPS announced it was laying off nearly 600 support staff, about half of whom were teacher aides, in a move to help close a nearly $400 million budget deficit. In late July, after the school board passed the $9.9 billion budget, the district announced another 45 layoffs and a hiring freeze on 200 positions.

“I am thinking a lot about the ways that we implement career ladders, where we start to support and move parents, parent workers, community members through certification programs, to fill paraprofessional roles in our system,” Biggs said. She also wants to support staff in taking on additional certification for high-demand roles like special education and bilingual education, and provide more paid, formalized leadership roles for teachers. 

Addressing this staffing crisis, Biggs continued, also extends to offering incentives to close the district’s bus driver shortage, which left CPS general education students without bus transportation this past school year. 

Above all, Biggs said, “I want to make sure all schools and all programs in CPS are accessible to all families.” 

A few things that can be done to better ensure this, she continued, is get all Chicago families enrolled in pre-kindergarten and make the process for applying to magnet and selective enrollment schools – as opposed to attending the assigned neighborhood school – more streamlined. 

Selective enrollment requires that students test into the schools; there are 14 elementary schools (also known as gifted and classical schools) and 11 high schools in Chicago that are selective enrollment. Students get entered into a lottery for magnet programs, like at Kenwood Academy, if they don’t live in the neighborhood attendance boundary. 

A Bronzeville resident, Biggs grew up in suburban Wheaton “in and around schools and school politics,” with two parents who were elementary school teachers. Her younger brother is also a special education teacher. 

After graduating from Loyola University in 2005, she followed in her family’s footsteps, joining Teach for America in California. She spent the next few years as a high school special education teacher in the Bay Area, where she noticed that her students lagged behind in basic literacy development. Partnering with school administrators and fellow staff, she was tasked with implementing evidence-based reading intervention programs for middle and high school students. She relocated to Boston in 2010 to get her masters in education from Harvard University, part of a program that moves Teach for America alums into leadership positions in CPS.

Biggs returned to Chicago the following year for a role as a resident principal at the former Canter Middle School in Kenwood, and transitioned to a role as full-time principal at Burke Elementary School in Washington Park the year after that. 

As the fourth leader at Burke in five years, Biggs said that one of her core priorities was to learn about and build on the community she entered into, both in-school and with the broader neighborhood. If elected, Biggs said she would look to do the same in District 6.

This, she continued, could include inviting parents and community members on “learning walks” in district schools and bringing Local Schools Councils from each school together to “learn from each other, to troubleshoot together, to problem solve together.” 

But her principal career was not without controversy. In 2018, Biggs was fired suddenly by CPS, a move that sparked pushback from parents, teachers and the broader community. 

CPS told parents that year that Biggs was fired after an investigation from the district’s inspector general concluded that Biggs told staff to mark students as tardy, even when children arrived late enough to have been marked absent for a half day. It also reported that she instructed staff to pick students up from their homes and take them to school “without the required paperwork on file.”

Six years later, Biggs told the Herald that, despite her requests, CPS never officially conducted an audit of available documentation to determine if those students should have been marked tardy or received half-day attendance.

As for staff driving students to school, which Biggs said was at the parent’s request, she acknowledged that CPS was correct in its finding that she didn’t keep a copy of that staff member’s driver's license on file in her office. But, she countered, “These have always seemed like far-fetched reasons to remove a successful and trusted school-leader.”

When asked about the firing, CPS told the Herald, "Biggs was a principal at Burke Elementary from 2013 to 2108 when she was terminated and designated as  'Do Not Hire'  following an Office of Inspector General’s investigation and report.” 

In 2018, WBEZ reported that some students, parents and teachers were suspicious that the firing had more to do with Burke being featured heavily in the news that year. In the midst of CPS’ scandal over dirty schools, when a majority of the city’s public schools maintained by Aramark custodial services were found to have failed cleanliness inspections, Burke teachers – and Biggs – were loudly calling attention to conditions at their school. Biggs also called attention to a delay in funding for the school’s special education services. 

“I took a position around the Aramark custodial contract, and the fact that it was not adequately providing needed services to our schools,” Biggs told the Herald. “I took a position in support of our special education students and the funding that they deserved, particularly in Black and brown communities. And we’re still working on those issues as a system today.” 

“Standing up for what is right, particularly when you’re doing that in partnership with marginalized communities, can often be costly,” Biggs said. “And I certainly experienced that. And I experienced that around issues that have remained issues in CPS today.” 

“I would continue to take those positions as a member of the board,” she continued.  

The fall after the firing, Biggs took a job as director of Southwest Systems of Care, a program of the Southwest Organizing Project that helps bring health care service providers to six neighborhood schools on the southwest side.

While there, she was brought on Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s racial equity rapid response team, which was tasked with implementing a community response to Covid-19. This included overseeing PPE distribution, messaging, placement of testing sites and vaccine distribution and education. 

She also served as a regional director of the Southwest Healthy Chicago Equity Zone, a city initiative that works with hyperlocal partnerships to close Chicago’s racial life expectancy gap.

“Thinking through a community lens, and the ways that we need to be thoughtful about facilitating partnership between community and community resources, community-based organizations and our neighborhood schools is absolutely an expertise that I would bring to the board,” Biggs said of these recent roles.

Biggs has been endorsed by several South Side alderpeople, including Ald. Pat Dowell (3rd), Ald. Lamont Robinson (4th), and Ald. Jeanette Taylor (20th), as well as Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle. Additionally, Biggs said that 70 unique donors have given to her campaign since she joined the race in May, raising more than $17,000, not including in-kind donations. 

On Election Day in November, Biggs is slated to take on Andre Smith, a longtime 20th Ward aldermanic hopeful, and Anusha Thotakura, deputy director of Citizen Action-Illinois.