Three candidates want to represent the 5th District on Chicago’s new elected school board, which stretches from the affluent West Loop into the more disinvested West Side neighborhoods of West Garfield Park and Austin. But only one candidate is officially on the ballot.
That’s Aaron “Jitu” Brown, a long-time education activist and advocate for the elected board. Two write-in candidates also qualified: attorney Jousef M. Shkoukani and Kernetha Jones. Brown and Shkoukani completed a candidate questionnaire. Jones did not.
Voters will see Michilla Blaise’s name; though she has dropped out of this race, the mayor recently appointed her the board after the current board abruptly announced their resignations.
Brown and Shkoukani live on opposite ends of the district — Shkoukani lives in the West Loop, while Brown lives in Austin.
They also diverge on two topics embroiling the school district. Schools CEO Pedro Martinez says Mayor Brandon Johnson asked him to resign, but he refused. The heart of their dispute is how to close a budget deficit this year and manage strapped school finances going forward. The board has the final say over Martinez’s contract.
At a recent Chalkbeat Chicago forum, Brown said he doesn't know if he would support keeping the CEO if elected. Asked if he supported “taking out a high-interest loan to cover operating costs,” which Johnson has floated to manage CPS’ deficit, Brown said, “As opposed to cutting primarily Black or brown schools, [if that] means children without a teacher, students without resources: yes.”
Shkoukani answered yes to keeping Martinez: “There's been really good statistics around his performance overall as a CEO of CPS — from testing scores, literacy rates — and so I'm a fan of his work so far.”
He also rejected borrowing. “While I think it's incredibly important that we make sure that our teachers have what they need,” said Shkoukani, “first and foremost, it's also important that we do it in the right way. I don't want to mortgage our kids' futures.”
The two candidates also differ in key areas: school closings and charter schools. Brown, who is endorsed by the Chicago Teachers Union, wants to develop a pre-K through 12th grade model to encourage local parents to send their kids to neighborhood schools instead of charter schools.
Shkoukani supports charters alongside neighborhood schools and is open to considering closing low-enrollment schools.
Some community advocates, including Valerie Leonard, who trains nonprofit leaders, agree that something should be done about District 5 schools like Frederick Douglass Academy High School, which currently has 27 students.
“We're at a point now where we’ve really got to make some tough decisions,” said Leonard, “and I'm just hoping the tough decisions can be grounded in solid planning that result in win-win solutions for these children and families.”
Brown, 58, grew up in Rosemoor on the South Side. He graduated from Kenwood Academy High School, which his teenage son now attends. Brown said he couldn’t find a neighborhood school in the 5th District that would challenge his son on the football field and in the classroom.
“It shouldn’t be like that,” Brown said.
If elected, Brown vows to prioritize neighborhood schools, end “punitive” standardized testing and develop a new curriculum that would cater to the needs of the Black and brown students who make up roughly 90% of the student population.
Brown said he has been doing similar work nationally as the national director of the Journey for Justice Alliance, which advocates against the privatization of public schools.
In Chicago, he has worked since 2006 for an elected school board to stop “people outside of our communities making decisions about the institutions that impact our lives.” In 2015, Brown participated in the hunger strike that saved Dyett High School after CPS voted to close it.
Shkoukani, 29, is a first-generation Palestinian American from Michigan. He earned a JD from Michigan State Law School before moving to Chicago in 2021.
Shkoukani works as an attorney at the firm Shook, Hardy & Bacon. He is a local school council member at the Wilma Rudolph Learning Center, a special education elementary school, and founded Unified Under Hope, a small nonprofit where he runs a reading retention program and provides students with back-to-school resources.
Leonard thinks Shkoukani’s home in West Loop is far removed from the rest of the 5th District, where 77% of the students come from low-income backgrounds.
The fact that Brown lives in Austin, one of the neighborhoods most affected by school closures over the last two decades, gives him an advantage over Shkoukani, Leonard said.
“I don't think that if you're an outsider, you can't do the job,” she said. “But I think right about now, we need someone who can hit the ground running and who understands the issues at hand through experience.”
Shkoukani said his fresh perspective is needed: “I come from a generation that is immersed in leveraging technology to come up with cost-saving solutions that improve the quality of our student’s education.”
That includes taking a look at some of the district’s underenrolled schools and assessing whether it is feasible to keep them running, he said.
Shkoukani thinks magnet and selective enrollment schools are vital to the school system, and unlike Brown, he doesn’t “believe we should be diverting money away from them.”
He also thinks boosting literacy skills and doing away with standardized testing more than once a year will help improve the achievement of Black and brown students.
After he didn’t make the ballot, Shkoukani said he decided to run as a write-in to give 5th District residents a choice.
“I'm not backed by a special interest group like the CTU,” Shkoukani said. “I just genuinely care about the prospect of our future education here in Chicago, because this is where my wife and I hope to raise our kids.”
Anna Savchenko is a reporter for WBEZ. You can reach her at asavchenko@wbez.org.
