CPS records show 723 employees disciplined in one year

Chicago Public Schools sustained misconduct allegations against 723 employees in 794 disciplinary cases between January 3, 2025, and January 6, 2026, according to district records reviewed by WTTW News. The same records review found that 10 employees resigned or were fired in cases involving allegations of sexual abuse of a student, while nearly two dozen cases overall involved allegations of sexual misconduct or discrimination. (news.wttw.com)

The new reporting matters less as a count of scandal than as a measure of system load. CPS is educating 316,224 students across 630 schools in 2025-26, and the records suggest that staff misconduct is not handled by a single office or a single kind of investigation. Instead, cases can move through school administrators, the district’s Office of Student Protections and Title IX, the independent Office of Inspector General, and the Office of Administrative Hearings, depending on what is alleged and who is involved. (cps.edu)

What changed this week is public visibility. WTTW said it obtained the records over four months, giving an unusual districtwide view into discipline that families and employees do not usually get in one place. The records also come with limits: they show sustained allegations and resulting discipline, but they do not by themselves answer every question about how quickly cases were handled, how consistently schools escalated concerns, or how many initial complaints never led to discipline. WTTW reported that about 3% of the allegations in 2025 were later overturned or reduced on appeal. (news.wttw.com)

A layered reporting and discipline system

CPS’s public-facing policies show why these cases can be hard for outsiders to follow. The Office of Student Protections and Title IX says it coordinates the district response to reports involving students and leads trauma-informed investigations in serious or complex cases, including serious employee misconduct toward students. The Equal Opportunity Compliance Office handles adult-to-adult and student-to-adult discrimination, harassment and retaliation cases, while the Office of Administrative Hearings presides over discipline hearings and union grievances. Board rules, meanwhile, allow principals, supervisors, the CEO or designee, and the general counsel to discipline employees under the applicable policy or labor agreement. (cps.edu)

For sexual-misconduct complaints involving students, the inspector general remains central. The OIG says its Sexual Allegations Unit, created in 2018 after the Chicago Tribune’s “Betrayed” series, investigates adult-on-student sexual misconduct and in many cases is the only body investigating those complaints. Its process page says complaints can come from school administrators, Title IX representatives, OSP, or directly from the public, and that if there appears to be a potential student-safety threat, information is shared with CPS or charter leadership to decide whether a person should be removed pending investigation. CPS’s own student-protection page says adults accused of abuse are immediately removed from schools pending investigation. (cpsoig.org)

That combination of offices is meant to solve an old problem: cases that once got lost between campus management, HR, compliance staff and outside agencies. But it also creates a practical challenge for school leaders and families. When a district has multiple entry points and multiple standards of proof, transparency depends not just on having the right offices on paper, but on fast handoffs, clear documentation and a shared understanding of who owns a case at each stage. That is especially important in a district as large as CPS, where even “routine” misconduct cases can consume significant administrator time. (cps.edu)

The sexual-misconduct cases are a small share of the total, but not a small signal

WTTW’s review found that most sustained cases in the one-year window involved ordinary workplace violations rather than abuse. Even so, the 10 cases involving sexual-abuse allegations matter because student-safety systems are judged less by how they handle the median infraction than by whether they detect boundary violations early, remove adults when necessary and keep one report from becoming a pattern. CPS’s updated 2025 policy on reporting child abuse and inappropriate relations explicitly requires mandated reporters to report conduct suggesting grooming or an inappropriately intimate relationship with a child, even when they do not yet have reasonable suspicion that sexual misconduct occurred. (news.wttw.com)

The OIG’s own recent reporting suggests those concerns are not hypothetical. In its fiscal 2025 annual report, the office said it continued dozens of adult-on-student sexual misconduct investigations and described multiple cases on one high school campus that came to light years after the conduct occurred. In a December 2025 board presentation, the Sexual Allegations Unit said it opened 246 cases and closed 336 in fiscal 2025; the same presentation showed that, in fiscal 2026 through November 30, high schools were generating a much higher allegation rate per 100,000 students than elementary schools. (cpsoig.org)

That does not mean every allegation is substantiated, nor that the WTTW count can be read as a one-to-one measure of danger to students. It does mean CPS is operating a high-volume safeguarding system in which relatively small breakdowns in reporting, reassignment or follow-up can have outsized consequences. A district can point to specialized units, annual training and updated policies; the harder test is whether those safeguards work at the school level, where a principal has to decide the same day whether a complaint belongs with DCFS, OSP, OIG, HR, police, or some combination of all five. (cps.edu)

What school leaders should watch next

For principals, safeguarding teams and union representatives, the WTTW findings raise three practical questions. First, are schools escalating concerns early enough, especially lower-level boundary violations that may not look criminal at first? Second, is the district making consistent interim staffing decisions when an allegation surfaces? Third, are employees and families able to understand what happens after a report is filed, including appeal rights and final disciplinary outcomes? CPS policy materials describe reporting channels, annual training obligations and hearing processes, but the district documents reviewed for this story do not provide a simple districtwide dashboard showing complaint-to-resolution timelines across all forms of employee misconduct. (cps.edu)

That gap is not just a communications problem. In a system this large, opaque discipline data can weaken trust in both directions: families may fear the district moves too slowly to protect children, while employees may see a process that feels fragmented and difficult to challenge. WTTW’s finding that some cases were overturned or reduced on appeal is a reminder that safeguarding and due process are not competing values so much as simultaneous obligations. CPS has built a more elaborate misconduct-response structure since 2018. The next test is whether district leaders can show, with clearer public evidence than a records request, that the structure is working fast enough and consistently enough to protect students before warning signs turn into larger failures. (news.wttw.com)