42 West Madison Street, 3rd Floor • Chicago, IL 60602

Jesse H. Ruiz Interim Chief Executive Officer

May 11, 2015

Dear CPS Principal, As you well know, Chicago Public Schools faces tremendous financial challenges in Fiscal Year 2016. Despite our best efforts to cut administrative and operational expenses over the last several years, and putting forward a bare bones capital spending plan just a few weeks ago, our District still projects an operating deficit of more than $1 billion. The long-term financial stability of CPS is in the hands of our elected representatives in Springfield. We need them to act now to address our deepening structural deficit, which is driven by a broken pension system that forces Chicago taxpayers to pay twice for teacher pensions and inadequate state funding for education. For example, as you may know, CPS has about 17% of the state’s teacher population and yet receives less than 1% of state teacher retirement funding. This letter is to let you know that while we continue to work on individual school budgets for next school year, we do not think it is productive or in the best interest of our school communities to release school budgets that will drastically impact our classrooms if Springfield does not take action. Over the past several years, we have done everything we can to keep cuts away from the classroom, but if Springfield does not make the changes our district needs we can no longer make that guarantee. Therefore, we are going to distribute school budgets for 2015-16 once we know how legislators will respond to these funding challenges. We understand how important these budgets are for your planning and so we will keep you updated on key developments. Despite the financial challenges our district faces, the children of Chicago are making steady and meaningful academic progress in our schools in large part because of your dedication and the hard work of our teachers and families. We cannot let our fiscal challenges undermine the encouraging results we are seeing in our classrooms and we hope you are willing to partner with us as we work for meaningful reform in Springfield that is critical to putting CPS on sound financial footing. Thank you for all that you do to provide our students with a brighter future. Sincerely,

Jesse H. Ruiz Interim Chief Executive Officer Chicago Public Schools