The Dumpster Fire at City Hall

Too serious to be a soap opera.

Mayor Johnson unveiled his new hand-picked school board after the his previous board resigned in mass.

The Soap Opera Continues

The Dumpster Fire at City Hall could be the name of a new soap opera or sitcom if it wasn’t so serious and if Chicago Public Schools students and families weren’t paying the price.

The latest episode of palace intrigue has Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Communications Director, Ronnie Reese “leaving his post effective immediately,” according to a mayor’s office spokesperson.

According to WBEZ:

Reese helped propel Johnson into the mayor’s office. He ran campaign communications after spending more than a decade as a deputy press secretary at the Chicago Teachers Union where Johnson was a paid organizer.

It is unclear why Reese has been canned, but it comes amid a string of high-profile departures from the mayor’s top team, including his entire hand-picked schoolboard, his deputy mayor of intergovernmental affairs, Sydney Holman, and his deputy mayor for education, Jennifer Johnson (“for health and family reasons”).

Two of Holman’s deputies, Audrey Harding and Melanie Berks, also left the city’s intergovernmental affairs team charged with building relationships across the City Council and whipping votes to secure Johnson’s progressive agenda.

The resignation of the entire school board then led to 30 of the 50 aldermen signing onto a letter saying the mass resignations bring "further instability" to the Chicago Public Schools, and calling for more transparency on the reasons for the shakeup.

According to Alice Yin at the Tribune:

But the noise surrounding last week’s stunning shakeup has hardly died down, with condemnation continuing to pour in from City Council, including Johnson’s progressive allies, as well as Springfield.

Then yesterday it was announced that the mayor had chosen a Chicago cop as one of his replacement appointees to his new school board. I’m still waiting to hear why. It seems like an educator would have been a much better choice. You might remember that the mayor — who at one time wanted to “defund the police” —- and his former school board had barred cops from the schools, even those schools who chose to spend their allotted state school safety funds to keep their CPD member as a School Resource Officer.

Johnson has since walked back defunding the police, saying, “It was a political goal. I never said it was mine." Confused? Yes, me too.

Then, the mayor refused to allow any of his new school board members to answer questions from reporters or to attend this week’s city council meeting where the school budget and the CEO Martinez job were to be discussed. Finally, Johnson cancelled CPS’ upcoming monthly board meeting — previously slated for today and pushed it back to Dec. 12, more than a month after 10 candidates will be elected to make up half of a new, partially elected, partially appointed school board.

As a friend told me, “the government is not governmenting.”

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It’s difficut to understand how years of city-wide support and all that good will engendered by the CTU during the years of Karen Lewis’ leadership could be squandered on sectarian infighting and power struggles in just a year after the election of Brandon Johnson as mayor.

I think a big part of it is that current CTU Pres. Stacy Davis Gates and Johnson himself have never been able to get past their 2019 election defeat at the hands of former anti-machine Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Johnson’s first year in office has been marked by a purge of former Lightfoot staffers, starting with the firing of former city Public Health Commissionar, Dr. Allison Arwady. More recently, Gates and Johnson have tried unsuccessfully to dump Chicago schools CEO Pedro Martinez, another Lightfoot appointee.

More from WBEZ…

Some former press office staffers complained of mistreatment under Reese, including being yelled at by senior leadership, diminishing job responsibilities and experiencing conflict for previously working under former Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

In one case, two months into Johnson’s term, staffers pitched a 60-second video to recap the week’s events, citing the success the strategy had under Lightfoot, records obtained by WBEZ show. Reese said the idea was a no-go.

“As a general rule, anything following ‘under MLL…’ isn’t going to be a good idea for this administration,” Reese wrote in response, according to a copy of the message obtained by WBEZ.