Cook County is considering whether to extend a financial lifeline to Chicago Public Schools by including the district in an interest-free loan program so the cash-strapped school system can avoid some costs because of late-landing property tax money.

But the $300 million pot of loan funding Board President Toni Preckwinkle announced last month is not even enough to cover a month of payroll, CPS said in a statement Tuesday. The district estimates county Treasurer Maria Pappas also still owes it $250 million from the last round of late property tax bills.

The Chicago Teachers Union made a public push this week, calling for the Cook County Board to open up the loan program to CPS and for the treasurer to release still-owed money on the eve of the launch of CPS’ 2027 budget.

The loan program is currently limited to suburban districts. But without loan money or full payment from April’s bills, union members argued cuts to needed school spending and union jobs were guaranteed.

“These delays are further robbing our students of access to special education teachers, to libraries and critical services at a time when they need it the most,” Pavlyn Jankov, CTU’s research director, said at a Tuesday morning press conference. He described the district’s exclusion from the loan program, which opens for applications next week, as “unacceptable.”

CPS is set to announce its 2026-2027 school year budget Wednesday, which includes cuts to hundreds of teachers, central office and citywide staff to help close the district’s massive deficit.

During Wednesday’s public comment period ahead of the county board’s finance committee, some union members urged commissioners to vote no to the entire loan program unless CPS was included. Chicago Board of Education members Frank Bannon and Debbie Pope also testified, as did Hilario Dominguez, the union’s endorsed school board president candidate, arguing CPS shouldn’t be punished for the county’s operational problems.

Finance Committee members on Wednesday ultimately approved the loan program without CPS on assurances that Preckwinkle’s team would “explore” how CPS could be included and whether the pot of available loan money would need to grow. Several progressive members also said they would support a special session in Springfield to secure more school funding, a long-term goal of the teachers union.

That sets up full approval for the $300 million loan program for suburban districts on Thursday.

CPS officials did not testify, but in a Tuesday statement, agreed that systemic delays issuing bills and paying out property tax revenues “carry a heavy price tag for Chicago’s students,” forcing short-term borrowing to cover operating expenses and penalty fees for delayed deposits into the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund.

While property owners have become familiar with the headache of several late property tax billing cycles in recent years, schools, libraries and villages across the county have also had to deal with the knock-on effect: getting their property tax revenues late.

Each year, governments typically get two large infusions of property tax dollars in the weeks after people pay their bills. But after years of on-time bills, several recent billing cycles — last winter and this past spring — were late, and distributions were further delayed because of ongoing tech upgrade troubles between Pappas’ office and contractor Tyler Technologies.

Some districts were over- and under-paid as a result of those difficulties. The problems are not fully resolved. Pappas’ office has opted to hold onto about $400 million — about 2% of all the property taxes levied across the county — to make sure districts get the right amount when true up calculations are ultimately corrected.

CPS estimates it is still owed $250 million in property tax revenues from first installment bills that were due back in April. Pappas’ office said it paid the district the vast majority of its total levy — about $4 billion — since December, plus a TIF surplus totaling nearly $580 million in March and July.

Many districts suffered a major cash crunch during the recent delays. Some school and library districts had to issue short-term bonds, put projects on hold, cash out investments or drain emergency funds to keep operations going. CPS, which has very little cash wiggle room, similarly borrowed to make do.

Between paying back borrowing and delayed payments to the teachers pension fund, CPS estimated 2025 delays cost $30 million and this year’s delays so far cost $10 million. Every district dollar spent on interest or penalties makes filling CPS’ estimated $700 million deficit that much harder.

The next round of bills will be two months late, mailed at the start of September and due by October. Distributions to schools, libraries and villages trickle out in the weeks after that.

Preckwinkle has not blamed any one cause, but previously noted delays in one year can lead to several screwed up cycles down the line. The property tax processes crisscross multiple offices and many operations happen sequentially, meaning a delay in one area can quickly snowball into more delays.

When announcing this year’s two-month delay in June, Preckwinkle said she would re-launch a $300 million bridge loan program to front money to certain local governments until property tax revenues come through. But CPS — and the city of Chicago — were excluded.

Her office changed course Tuesday, saying they were in talks with CPS to potentially grant them relief. It was unclear Wednesday whether the county would make its loan pool bigger to accommodate CPS’ needs, or how big CPS’ request would be.

In a statement, a CPS spokesperson said the $300 million “is inadequate for a district of CPS’s scale where a single month’s payroll during the school year exceeds the program’s entire available amount… Ultimately, every dollar spent navigating these administrative shortfalls is a dollar taken directly from student instruction.”

Cook County plans to issue its own line of credit to fund the bridge loan program. When property tax revenues roll in, the county gets paid back directly by intercepting the money it loaned out.

Because it has strong credit ratings and reserves, the county is likely to fetch much lower interest rates than CPS or other ailing school districts. Cook County ended last year with about $1.4 billion in various emergency funds — including $581 million that is “unassigned” to a specific emergency or future project — and recently earned another pair of upgrades from the ratings agency Fitch.

Past bridge loan programs have had hundreds of millions untapped after the dust cleared. Only 19 taxing bodies were given $23.2 million in loans in the 2025 cycle. In 2022, when the county offered up to $500 million, it ended up distributing about $40 million to a similar number of applicants.

But the county hopes more districts qualify and take advantage of the program this year. Following complaints from libraries and schools that they were ineligible in past cycles, Preckwinkle’s office said it would open the program up to districts that rely on property taxes for 50% or more of their total governmental revenues and said in a release that “disinvested communities that do not meet the first criteria will be offered additional consideration.”

Applications are supposed to open Monday through August 24.

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