Chicago is functionally bankrupt. It’s also run by Mayor Brandon Johnson: an incompetent radical appointee of the CTU teachers’ union. The CTU demands included everything from free weight loss drugs to a $2.5 billion pay hike for a group of people who are less effective as educators than the Washington Generals were at playing basketball.

Union President Stacy Davis Gates said in early March that her proposed contract for 2024 to 2028 ‘will cost $50 billion and 3 cents.’

‘And so what?’ Davis Gates added. ‘That’s audacity. That’s Chicago.’

How is Chicago gonna pay for even its existing obligations and vastly inflated salaries for the red shirts?

A $300 million high-interest loan. Seriously.

Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposal of what critics are calling a ‘payday loan’ for schools proved unpopular even with his own appointees on the Board of Ed who just resigned.

What started as tension between the mayor and Chicago Public Schools has developed into a full-blown crisis. All seven of his handpicked members of the board of education announced their resignation on Friday after declining to fire CPS CEO Pedro Martinez and amid contract negotiations with the powerful Chicago Teachers Union.

Sources tell Fox 32 Chicago the resignations are because several board members were agitated by a pressure campaign from the mayor’s office to fire Martinez and to approve a high-interest short-term loan to help plug a budget gap and pay for a large new teachers union contract.

More than half of the Chicago City Council released a statement Saturday afternoon in response to the mass resignation.

“This is unprecedented and brings further instability to our school district,” the statement read.

“Taking out a $300 million, high-interest payday loan is not a smart decision when CPS is already facing a massive deficit and the city an almost $1 billion deficit,” the statement continued.

Not a smart decision is an understatement.

The internal CPS memo, dated July 8, outlines the risks of borrowing to pay for hypothetical 4% raises for teachers and principals and cover a $175 million pension payment that was shifted to the school district by former Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

If the district covered those raises and pension payments, the district’s projected deficit would grow to $933 million for next fiscal year, the memo said. Borrowing $300 million to pay for expenses this year “only shifts the problem” to the following year and will mean higher costs to pay off debt down the line, the memo said.

CPS had roughly $9.3 billion in outstanding debt as of June 1, and its debt-service obligations already divert hundreds of millions of dollars away from classrooms every year. Officials included more than $800 million in debt payments in the district’s proposed $9.9 billion operating budget announced earlier this week.

In addition to the pension payments, the suggested borrowing would help cover $120 million in increased costs associated with a new Chicago Teachers Union contract. Another $8 million would be for costs related to the first contract under Chicago’s new principals union, the memo says. Both contracts are still in negotiations.

For the kids. Right?

Test scores and academic performance have continued to drop, while education spending has continued to rise – with most of the spending on payroll. Since 2012, education spending has increased by 97%, while reading proficiency has decreased by 63% and math proficiency by 78%.

About three-quarters of CPS students can’t read at grade level and even fewer can do math.

That’s okay because Chicago teachers get paid more money, the worse the students do in line with the traditional leftist formula, “the worse, the better”. If they can achieve 99% illiteracy, they’ll be set for life riding an endless crisis wave as soon as that high-interest loan paying for their free everything clears.