What to know before you vote in Chicago’s elected school board races
Eighteen-year-old Alexander Angeles graduated just a few months ago from Hancock High School. Now a college student, he works part-time at O’Reilly Auto Parts and picks up night shifts at McDonald’s.
He wants to be U.S. president someday. For now, he’ll settle for a (slightly) lower office: a seat on the Chicago school board, as a write-in candidate.
It’s a quixotic campaign in an uncontested Southwest Side district, and the odds, Angeles acknowledged, are slim. But he said he firmly believes students should have a place on the governing body overseeing the nation’s third-largest school district — and voters should have more than one choice.
“My goal is to win. I want to win. But I feel like it’s bigger than this,” said Angeles, running in District 8B, which stretches southwest from the Loop to Chicago Lawn.
The teen faces an improbable, if not impossible, path to victory. As a write-in candidate, he must not only win voters’ support and but also persuade them to remember and write his full name on the November ballot. But Angeles, ever-optimistic, isn’t deterred by his odds.
His opponent is Chicago police Detective Juan Ignacio Gonzalez. Gonzalez is also a Marine Corps veteran and the founder of DreamCatcher Café, a coffee shop and community space in Back of the Yards.
The Chicago Board of Education is transitioning from mayoral control to a 21-member elected board, including a citywide school board president. But after ballot challenges, a quarter of all district-level races will be uncontested in November. That includes two races where incumbents are running unopposed, and another three where all the competition was knocked off the ballot. District 8B is among them.
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Incumbent Cydney Wallace, who was appointed to her seat by Mayor Brandon Johnson, was removed from the ballot after elections officials ruled she didn’t have the required number of valid signatures.
In the adjacent District 8A, incumbent Angel Gutierrez is also uncontested, leaving the entirety of District 8 — a large swath of the Southwest Side with more than 275,000 mostly Latino residents and 62 schools — with only one choice in the November election.
Angeles’ top three priorities are improving school lunches, creating more opportunities for student voices and smaller class sizes. As a high schooler, he was elected as a student representative on Hancock’s Local School Council. He grew up in West Lawn and now studies political science at the University of Illinois Chicago.
He said he aligns with the progressive Chicago Teachers Union and was heavily influenced by his teachers at Hancock. He considered circulating signatures earlier in the year — the traditional route to candidacy — but said he didn’t want to oppose Wallace, the incumbent. Then she was kicked off the ballot.
“I think everyone deserves a choice, and it’s clear that me and my opponent have different ideologies,” Angeles said. “The district I seek to represent also is made out of different ideologies, and just having one ideology being in the election is not the best choice.”
Nationally, school board races are often uncontested, and in Chicago, the lack of compensation is another barrier to prospective candidates. Board members are expected to dedicate hours each week to attending meetings, reviewing documents and meeting with constituents.
“It’s kind of a crappy job to be a school board member. In most communities, you don’t get paid, it takes a lot of time, and people are always yelling at you and getting mad at you about stuff,” said Vladimir Kogan, an education policy researcher and political science professor at Ohio State University. “There’s very little upside.”
The decade-long movement for an elected school board in Chicago was in part fueled by public outcry and deep distrust after the 2013 mass school closures. Advocates, including CTU, saw the elected model as a vehicle for equity and community voice in the nation’s third-largest school district.
But in practice, that vision gets more complicated, Kogan said. Voter turnout is often low, particularly in down-ballot races. And the incumbency advantage tends to dissuade prospective candidates, which has a domino effect on future elections.
“In school board elections, it turns out our theory of what a democracy looks like often doesn’t match the reality,” Kogan said.
Angeles’ opponent, Gonzalez, has been a Chicago police officer since 1999. A CPS graduate, he said he decided to run after hearing from parents and community members at his coffee shop. He’s most focused, he said, about improving classroom instruction, particularly in reading and math.
Gonzalez added that he is concerned about disparities in student outcomes across the city.
“I refuse to accept that,” Gonzalez said. “I know that given the opportunity, given the resources that the teachers need, and focusing on the education, we can get to the standards where they’re the same across the board.”
Gonzalez has received support from Common Ground Collective, the Illinois Network of Charter Schools and Urban Center, all pro-school-choice groups that have opposed CTU’s influence on the board. But he’s largely self-funded his campaign, raising $32,000 to date. Angeles has yet to report any campaign contributions.
“I commend him for the work that he’s trying to do, but from a student perspective, can you tell a teacher, ‘Hey, this is what I think you lesson plan should be’ … can you tell a construction worker, ‘Hey, I’m going to make sure we build that school,’” Gonzalez said. “Does he have that capability?”
But Angeles offered a different outlook. “These older people talk a lot about what’s best for students, but in reality, I feel like they don’t represent younger people very well,” he said. “I want to be that someone. I know what students actually want.”