Lori Lightfoot receives ethics complaint from Parents Defending Education
Rachel Schilke
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Parents Defending Education have filed an ethics complaint against Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, calling emails sent encouraging students to volunteer for her reelection campaign as “political patronage.”
Lightfoot confirmed on Thursday that a campaign staffer sent the emails to Chicago Public School teachers, stating that students would receive school credit in exchange for working 12 hours per week on the campaign. A later statement said the opportunity would provide children the chance to learn more about civic engagement and the mayor’s campaign.
LORI LIGHTFOOT DID NOT KNOW OF EMAILS SENT TO CHICAGO TEACHERS BY STAFFER
“We’re simply looking for enthusiastic, curious and hardworking young people eager to help Mayor Lightfoot win this spring,” the email read, according to photos of the email in the complaint.
Parents Defending Education, a national nonprofit organization, filed a complaint with the Chicago Board of Education, claiming that Lightfoot violated a section of the law prohibiting city officials, employees, or candidates for city offices from “intentionally [using] any City property or resources of the City in connection with any prohibited political activity.”
The complaint also states that the offer of “class credit” could violate another section of the law under a “gifts and other favors” statute: “No person shall offer, with intent to violate, or make a gift that violates, this section.”
Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education, said in a statement that Chicago students’ education should not have been affected by the mayor’s campaign.
“Tragically, far too many students in Chicago Public Schools are unable to read or write at grade level — even prior to the CTU-led school closures, which disproportionately impacted the city’s disadvantaged children,” Neily said. “Chicago students should be sitting in classrooms and focused on making up this learning loss so that they have the opportunity to make a better life for themselves — not being conscripted as foot soldiers in Mayor Lightfoot’s re-election campaign.”
The ethics complaint references claims from the Chicago Teachers Union that parents or students could face retribution for not volunteering, something Lightfoot denied.
“Political patronage has long plagued all levels of Illinois government, with employees’ jobs often hinging on their political activities in support of — or against — specific political candidates,” the complaint states.
Lightfoot said she had no knowledge of the emails until she received a media inquiry on the matter, and her team “put a stop to it.” The staffer was not fired, Lightfoot said.
Parents Defending Education called for an investigation into how the staffer obtained the public schools’ cps.edu emails, and “whether the Lightfoot campaign paid fair market value” for this contact information.
Lightfoot argued that the staffer did a Google search of the emails to find them, and no government funds were used to fund the emails.
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“Bottom line here is it was clearly a mistake,” Lightfoot said. “And we’ve made sure that we emphasized that, not only to the staff involved but everybody on our campaign, to ensure that this kind of conduct doesn’t happen again.”