Education
Lightfoot Campaign Emails to CPS Teachers Raised ‘Significant Constitutional Issues,’ But Watchdog Finds No Coordination With District
Mayor Lori Lightfoot appears on "Chicago Tonight" on Jan. 3, 2023. (WTTW News)
Former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s reelection campaign had already been warned twice about sending electioneering emails to public employees before the incumbent drew widespread criticism in January 2023 when her campaign sent emails to Chicago Public Schools teachers asking them to encourage students to volunteer to help Lightfoot win a second term, a watchdog investigation found.
That’s according to a new annual report published Wednesday from the CPS Office of Inspector General (OIG), which highlights the office’s major investigations from the previous year.
The OIG discovered that an employee of the Lightfoot campaign sent 219 emails to 133 CPS employee email addresses — most of which were volunteer solicitations — and that in total, the campaign sent 7,500 emails to 219 CPS email accounts.
While the OIG found no evidence of coordination between the Lightfoot campaign and the district, the watchdog determined the emails essentially asked employees to violate CPS policy and raised “significant constitutional issues.”
“It’s important to note, too, that Campaign Employee A’s emails were not just for any candidate, but rather the incumbent mayor of Chicago,” the report from Interim Inspector General Amber Nesbitt states. “CPS employees who received Campaign Employee A’s emails were thus asked to make a professionally and ethically fraught choice: pass along the message to students and violate CPS policy or ignore outreach from the highest elected official in the city.”
As with all investigations in the OIG report, Lightfoot’s name was withheld, but she was repeatedly referred to as the “incumbent mayor” and details of the CPS emails match WTTW News reporting from the time.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for Mayor Lightfoot claimed she was “never involved personally in these volunteer recruitment endeavors.”
“As the CPS OIG report concludes, and as we have made clear since day one, our campaign did not intentionally engage in improper coordination with CPS,” the spokeswoman said. “The OIG report also notes, correctly, that this initiative, spearheaded by one staffer, did not actually have the effect of intimidating any CPS employees into doing anything unethical or inappropriate, and led to fewer than 10 volunteer signups.”
As WTTW News first reported on Jan. 11, 2023, the emails said participants in the “externship program” would be expected to contribute 12 hours per week to the Lightfoot campaign and students could earn “class credit.”
“We’re simply looking for enthusiastic, curious and hard-working young people eager to help Mayor Lightfoot win this spring,” according to an email obtained by WTTW News.
Eight students — all minors — agreed to volunteer, according to the OIG report, and were each required to sign a non-disclosure agreement without their parents being notified. In an interview with the OIG, Lightfoot denied knowledge of this and stated that it was “of course” inappropriate.
The emails, which were first reported on by WTTW News, led to immediate criticism from other mayoral candidates.
Lightfoot’s campaign eventually said it would “cease contact with CPS employees” out of an “abundance of caution" and then later added in another statement that all campaign employees had been “reminded about the solid wall that must exist between campaign and official activities and that contacts with any city of Chicago, or other sister agency employees, including CPS employees, even through publicly available sources is off limits. Period.”
Days later, the Chicago Board of Ethics unanimously voted to ask both the Chicago inspector general and the CPS OIG to probe whether Lightfoot’s campaign violated the city’s government ethics ordinance.
Lightfoot, who was completing her first term as mayor, was defeated in her reelection bid, failing to qualify for a runoff election ultimately won by Mayor Brandon Johnson.
According to Nesbitt’s office, Lightfoot’s campaign had previously been warned twice in 2022 — once by the Chicago Board of Ethics and again by City Colleges of Chicago — yet the campaign “seemingly failed to communicate these warnings internally.”
The Ethics Board stated it “hand-delivered” its warning in a letter to the mayor, but Lightfoot denied having ever received it and stated she was unaware of the CCC warning, the OIG report states.
Nesbitt’s office interviewed the City Colleges official who issued that warning, and they stated the Lightfoot campaign resumed emailing CCC employees just weeks after the warning.
Ultimately, the OIG said it was unable to determine whether Lightfoot or other campaign officials knew of the CPS email efforts, though it said this was due to “the Campaign’s limited cooperation with the OIG, despite (Lightfoot’s) public assurances to the contrary.”
Lightfoot’s spokeswoman took issue with the notion her campaign didn’t comply fully with the OIG investigation, calling that claim “misleading.”
“We faithfully cooperated with all appropriate requests for available documents, as well as a lengthy interview process,” the spokeswoman said. “While the going-forward policy recommendations of the CPS OIG seem appropriate given the advent of the new elected school board, we will note that they are not currently in effect, nor were they when this campaign was taking place."
Nesbitt’s office said it recommended that CPS require school board and local school council candidates to file an attestation promising they won’t send district employees or students any “electioneering communications” at their cps.edu email addresses.
CPS responded that while it cannot require such a filing, it would send guidance to candidates about their ethical obligations. The district also recently said it created an email filter to quarantine or delete political emails before they reach CPS email address inboxes.
The district said it has a code of ethics in place for employees and student policies to keep political campaigns and elections outside of the classroom. And according to CPS, its ethics office received no reports of political emails sent to cps email addresses during the most recent election cycle.
Beyond that, the OIG did not recommend discipline for any CPS employees, even those who violated district policy by sharing the Lightfoot campaign email with students.
“These employees faced an unusual, unfair, and ethically fraught decision,” Nesbitt’s office said in its report. “Under these circumstances, the OIG found that discipline would not be appropriate.”
A CPS spokesperson in a statement said the district “remains committed to upholding all District policies and procedures as well as state and federal laws to best serve our students, families and greater CPS community.”
“CPS appreciates the work of the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and takes all findings and recommendations seriously,” the spokesperson said. “As a system of more than 40,000 employees serving more than 320,000 students, we remain committed to proactively and comprehensively training our valued employees and vendors to adhere to all policies and procedures, and to then enforce all policies, rules and laws, and implement discipline as required under law and in accordance with the highest ethical standards.”
CPS Basketball Enrollment Violations
Another major investigation highlighted in the report focused on an unnamed CPS high school, where the head coach and his staff conspired to violate residency rules and fraudulently enroll at least half of its student roster over the past three seasons.
That investigation was launched after members of the school community contacted the OIG with a “detailed complaint” alleging several student athletes lived outside of Chicago. In some instances, according to the report, parents were provided with fake proof-of-residency documents to make it appear they lived within the city.
Some of these fake addresses were even used repeatedly by multiple students, the OIG found, and many of them were connected directly to coaches at the school. The investigation also revealed many of the players had also played for the head coach’s club team, which is a violation of Illinois High School Association rules.
According to Nesbitt’s office, the head coach repeatedly lied during an interview with OIG investigators and gave “evasive, inconsistent, and incredible” answers. CPS said two of the three coaches cited in the report resigned and one was terminated. They are all currently ineligible for rehire with the District.
The OIG determined the school itself failed to enforce its enrollment procedures despite clear signs of enrollment fraud. The watchdog recommended CPS create a new position responsible for enforcing CPS and IHSA compliance and stated that as a result of this investigation, the district must “fundamentally reform how it oversees and regulates high school sports.”
PPP Fraud
The OIG report also highlighted investigations into CPS employees’ fraudulent use of the Paycheck Protection Program, a pandemic-era measure aimed at helping small businesses cover costs and pay.
In several cases, the OIG found CPS employees submitted loan applications with fake business information in order to receive a forgivable government loan.
A school administrator making $120,000 per year allegedly received a $20,000 PPP loan by claiming more than $100,000 in self-employment income during 2020, the report found. She eventually resigned her position.
Another administrator with an annual salary of more than $140,000 received a $12,500 PPP loan after claiming they had grossed $60,000 from a fake construction company. They resigned from their CPS position before cooperating with the OIG.
A third administrator received a $17,000 loan after she claimed $80,000 in revenue from her side business. When confronted with this, she claimed she’d made a mistake on her application but could not provide any proof she earned anything close to that amount from the business, the report states.
She, too, resigned from CPS after the OIG recommended she be terminated from her $120,000-per-year position.
Heather Cherone contributed to this report.
