By George N. Schmidt

Hundreds of CTU delegates were surprised and some were concerned near the end of the November meeting of the Chicago Teachers Union House of Delegates meeting when former union president Deborah Lynch, now a teacher at Gage Park High School and member of the CTU Executive Board (high school functional vice-president) walked out of the meeting.

The union officers laughed at Lynch, as did some of their dwindling number of supporters in the House, when she walked out after protesting the announcement. The union newspaper compounded the error by reporting the officers’ version without checking the rules.

A November meeting of the CTU Rules-Elections Committee (which has now been purged of anyone who is not a member of the union’s United Progressive Caucus) ruled that Lynch was right. Under rules approved for elections to fill vacancies on the executive board, a candidate has to get a majority of the votes, not simply the highest number of votes.

The runoff, to be held at the December House meeting, will put Ilich against Collins High School delegate Archie Moore.

At Substance press time, Moore’s supporters were organizing to call high school delegates and remind them to remain at the December meeting until after the vote. For more than a year, despite the fact that they received, at best, a slim majority of the votes that put them into power in the June 2004 election, Marilyn Stewart and the leaders of the United Progressive Caucus have been operating the union as if they had a mandate from 90 percent of the members. Since September, they have purged most union committees of those who opposed their caucus’s policies, further reducing union democracy.