Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) says she did not know about emails asking Chicago Public Schools educators to encourage their students to volunteer for her reelection campaign.
The emails to teachers, sent out by a staffer on Lightfoot’s campaign team, said students would be given school credit in exchange for working 12 hours per week on the campaign. A later statement said the opportunity was a chance for children to engage with the Lightfoot campaign and learn more about civic engagement.
LORI LIGHTFOOT’S CAMPAIGN ASKS TEACHERS TO GET STUDENTS TO VOLUNTEER: REPORT
The emails were sent to colleges, universities, and schools across the city.
The emails swiftly prompted backlash from many. The Chicago Teachers Union deemed the emails unethical and even threatening. It was initially perceived that there would be retribution if teachers or students refused to volunteer for the campaign.
A similar outreach effort happened in August, Lightfoot said. However, the Chicago mayor said she was unaware of both email outreaches to public school teachers until Wednesday afternoon when she received a media inquiry.
The moment she heard about the outreach, her team “put a stop to it,” Lightfoot said during a press conference Thursday afternoon.
“Bottom line here is it was clearly a mistake,” Lightfoot said. “And we’ve made sure that we emphasized that, not only to the staff involved but everybody on our campaign, to ensure that this kind of conduct doesn’t happen again.”
No government funds were used in the sending of the emails, Lightfoot said. A similar situation happened in August, right before school started, she said.
“I’m not just some candidate — I’m the mayor and responsible for the schools,” she said. “And this is the kind of outreach that never should have happened.”
“There must be a impenetrable wall,” Lightfoot continued, “not just a line but a wall between anything that happens on the political side and anything that happens on the official side, the government side. And that wall can never be breached.”
LORI LIGHTFOOT UNDER INVESTIGATION OVER CAMPAIGN EMAIL TO CHICAGO TEACHERS
Lightfoot said she has apologized to Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez and Chicago Board of Education President Miguel de Valle for the “unnecessary distraction.”
Even though the staffer used publicly available teacher email addresses and it was not a “nefarious action,” she made a mistake and recognizes the emails to public schools were “not the right thing to do,” the mayor added.
The mayor said the staffer will not be fired, as she knows she made mistakes in the past as a young lawyer and learned from them.
“I have a lot of young women that work for me, certainly in my political campaign but also in my administration,” she said. “I think this is an important teachable moment for them. It’s not lost on me that I’m a role model to young women across the city, and I think I have an obligation given that to make sure that I’m doing everything I can to teach and mentor.”
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The schools’ inspector general’s office said in a statement that it was launching an investigation into the emails.
The Washington Examiner has reached out to the office for an update on the investigation following Lightfoot’s press conference.
