At the Chicago school board meeting Friday night, Jennifer Custer, newly elected to that body but yet to begin her term, stepped up to speak to a group of board members who hadn’t been elected to anything. They’d recently been appointed by Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson for a sole purpose: to remove a Chicago Public Schools CEO in the way of handing Johnson’s former brothers and sisters at the Chicago Teachers Union an absurdly generous labor contract the city can’t afford. Custer, notably, had been endorsed by the CTU in the election. But on this day she had no words of support for the union, or for the mayor, or for these board members, many of whom soon will be her colleagues. Rather, she talked about kids and families and the future of CPS. “Will it be the choice for families moving forward to give their children the best education possible?” Custer said. “Or will families find another place that truly cares about their kids and doesn’t play political games with their future?” That’s what matters. And the immoral, myopic actions of the past few days have made the latter scenario all the more likely. Johnson and CTU President Stacy Davis Gates speak of more than $1 billion “owed” to CPS by the state of Illinois. They speak of the “ultrarich” who in their view “aren’t paying their fair share.” They called for CPS CEO Pedro Martinez — whom the duo finally succeeded in firing after months of backstabbing and inept plotting — to have the district borrow hundreds of millions at sky-high interest rates to give big raises to teachers who already are the highest paid of any big-city educators in the country. But what Johnson and Davis Gates never seem to acknowledge is that for many Chicago parents of school-age children, CPS is a choice, not an obligation. They can select alternatives — suburban schools or (if they have the wherewithal) parochial and other private schools, as Davis Gates herself has done for her son. For many such parents, witnessing or reading about spectacles like what happened on the Friday eve before Christmas week, when people just wanted to start preparing for their families’ holidays, will be yet another reason to leave behind the chaos that is the Chicago Public Schools — or avoid it altogether in the first place. Inevitably, more chaos is now in store for CPS. Having been advised by high-priced lawyers that they couldn’t fire Martinez for cause without incurring tremendous legal risk, this seven-member board voted to remove him “without cause,” or per the conditions in his employment contract. He must be given six months’ notice and paid additional severance. The next steps for Johnson and his CTU overseers seem to entail naming a “co-CEO” who would be given some (or maybe most) of Martinez’s current authority, including finalizing a labor contract with the union and taking on hundreds of millions in additional debt for a school district swimming in IOUs. Martinez has lawyered up as well and filed his own lawsuit on Friday, less than two hours before the board meeting. He says he will fight any effort to “modify” his duties. Understandably so. And, given the unwarranted and personal criticism he has absorbed with patience and dignity from Johnson’s amateurish new board members, he has sued for damages. Those board members individually are defendants, along with the board as an institution. Taxpayers will shoulder most if not all of the cost of eventually settling with Martinez, far and away the most likely outcome. A judge will have much to say about the success or failure — and timing — of Johnson’s kamikaze mission to give his close friend Davis Gates the union triumph she needs to hold onto her leadership post in the spring, when CTU next will hold its own election. In the meantime, other leaders in state and local government should not be sitting idly by, quietly appalled but hoping the courts keep the CPS train from derailing. We heard the beginnings of some stirrings as it became clearer that Johnson was indeed going to follow through on firing Martinez and pushing through a labor deal torpedoing the district’s shaky finances. Before the meeting, U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy Garcia, long a close ally of CTU and the union’s choice back in 2015 to challenge then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel, called on the board not to fire Martinez in the middle of the school year. “A clear and convincing justification for his removal has not been presented,” Garcia wrote. He was joined by other Latino political voices, including Yesenia Lopez, elected in November to the Chicago Board of Education and also endorsed by CTU. Lopez and Custer make two of the four CTU-endorsed school board winners to publicly oppose the union’s power play. With six others elected to the board without CTU’s backing, there appear to be eight incoming board members who will fight the union as this battle intensifies further. Per state law, Johnson is appointing 11 to the 21-member board, but an opposition bloc of eight is significant. Board meetings beginning in January, when the elected members join the panel, will get very interesting. In these pages, Illinois Rep. Kam Buckner, also long a CTU supporter, expressed support, too, for keeping Martinez as CPS CEO. But these newly elected school board members, who represent the wishes of the majority of Chicagoans, don’t have the power to wage this fight on their own. It’s time now for Gov. JB Pritzker, Senate President Don Harmon, House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch and other state political leaders to speak more forcefully on what’s happening in Chicago, which they all know is the critical economic engine of the state. Deliberately engineering a fiscal collapse of the nation’s fourth largest public school district, which is what CTU and Johnson seem determined to do in order to force the state or the “ultrarich” to bail out the system, ultimately will land at Springfield’s doorstep, something Pritzker and company also know. To date, what we’ve heard from Pritzker, Harmon and Welch are polite exhortations for prudent and rational financial decision-making at CPS. That’s not strong enough. Not anymore. Not after Friday night. Get involved, governor. It’s not too late. The longer you tiptoe around this mess, the worse the eventual fallout will be — for Chicago, for the state and for you, politically. Make it clear to Johnson and this dangerous union that sabotaging a crucial public school system for their joint self-interests cannot be tolerated in Illinois. Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email [email protected].