How is your Chicago Board of Education member voting?

How this tool works

Vote positions are entered from the Board Rule voting data file, which compiles public Board of Education records and meeting minutes; each vote links to its source.

All vote data in this tool is drawn from the voting data file maintained by Board Rule, a newsletter covering the Chicago Board of Education.

How to read a position

• Yes — a position recorded in the source record.
• No — a position recorded in the source record.
• Present — a position recorded in the source record.
• Not recorded — no position has been recorded for this member on this vote — distinct from Present, which is an entered position.

A position shown as Not recorded means no vote is recorded for that seat — the member may have been absent, not yet seated, or the seat may have been vacant at the time.

The Board President

The Board President votes only to break ties.

Key votes

Some votes carry a key vote designation. A key vote is one that drew significant public attention — through community or advocacy pressure, sustained media coverage, or because it was novel or precedent-setting.

The key-vote label is an editorial judgment about prominence, not a different way of counting the vote. A key vote is recorded with the exact same factual Yes / No / Present / Not recorded positions as every other vote; it is simply surfaced more prominently.

How the money figures work

Campaign finance figures are computed from committee filings with the State Board of Elections.

Combined across every school board election this member has run in, including runs for a different seat.

Direct contributions to a candidate's committee and independent spending supporting or opposing a candidate are different kinds of money. Each is totaled within its own stream, and no combined figure of the two is shown for any member.

Independent spending here covers current Board members only.

A committee’s other receipts (refunds, sales of assets and other money its filings don’t report as contributions, transfers or loans) are left out of all totals.

Some filings list the same gift more than once: the same donor, date and amount on one report. We keep every line as filed, because the filings can’t tell a repeated gift from a filer’s double entry.

Illinois reports a donor’s gifts by name once they pass $150 in a reporting period. Smaller gifts are reported as one total for each report, with no donor named. We count that total in Raised and show it as “Small gifts (unitemized),” never as a donor. Each report’s total belongs to the election whose window its reporting period ends in.

Industry classification of donors is an editorial layer and is always in progress. Each chart states how much of the money it shows carries a substantive industry tag, and money without itemized donor detail remains in a member's totals even where a chart cannot break it down.

These figures place money and votes side by side. They do not assert that one caused the other.

Seats and members

Appointed members are labelled; elected members are not, because election is the default this tool exists to track. A seat with no member is shown as Vacant and has no member page.

Spotted something wrong?

We rely on readers to help us keep this accurate.

Designed and constructed by Ishan Daya and the Institute for the Public Good.