CHICAGO _ The Chicago Teachers Union strike is over after 11 school days, and students will return to class on Friday.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced the end of the walkout after a lengthy closed-door meeting with CTU officials, resulting in an agreement that five days lost to the strike will be made up.
That issue arose as an eleventh-hour glitch late Wednesday when, despite the union's House of Delegates approving a tentative contract deal, the CTU said it was contingent on teachers being able to make up all the lost school days.
Lightfoot staunchly opposed that, and angrily said late Wednesday she was through negotiating. But she relented Thursday morning, saying she was available to talk about a compromise but wouldn't accept "unilateral demands" from the union.
A lengthy meeting followed at City Hall with union President Jesse Sharkey, who was there with throngs of rallying union members.
The union ultimately agreed to accept a compromise to make up five school days. But leaders weren't happy about it. They expressed frustration with the mayor for refusing to make up the full 11 days teachers have been on strike.
Union Vice President Stacy Davis Gates called it a "sad day" and criticized Lightfoot for taking "vengeance" on teachers and students.
"We have a better Chicago Public Schools as a result of the last 10 days," Davis Gates said.
Sharkey said the last two weeks have been "tense" but added that "it's not about me or the mayor. It's about the members of the Chicago Teachers Union."
Of those 25,000 union members, Sharkey said: "They don't need to see me smiling with the mayor. In fact what they need to see is they need to see we have a tentative agreement, we now have a return to work agreement. ... Frankly, it's been hard on teachers to be out this long, and it's been hard on parents to be out this long. It's been hard on our students.
"And so I just didn't feel like doing a celebration lap with the mayor right now," he said. "It's not what our members need to be looking at. That's not what people in the city need to be seeing."
Later, he added: "It's not a day for photo ops or victory laps."
Despite the late hiccup over the makeup days, union officials said they were overall pleased with what's in the tentative agreement, while the mayor called it the most generous contract in CPS history.
Union officials said it wasn't perfect but that they received many of their demands, including enforceable class size caps and a nurse and social worker in every school.
One of the bigger wins for the city was a five-year contract. The union has wanted a three-year deal, and also did not win the paid prep time it was seeking.
But Sharkey said the mayor "did the right thing" and kept her campaign promises.
Yet despite the end of the strike _ which outlasted the latest major CTU work stoppage in 2012 by several days _ the work to get a new union contract continues. Rank-and-file members must still vote to ratify the agreement, and the Chicago Board of Education must also sign off on the new deal.
Sharkey said there is work to be done to sell the deal to members and that he's "not going to say it's going to be a slam-dunk."
In fact, technically, the union vote was merely to suspend the strike, with ratification pending.
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