Local school council elections are upon us — Wednesday — a day after the Illinois primary

The Illinois primary will be held Tuesday. The next day is another important day for Chicago residents to vote. That day, please visit your local school to vote in your local school council election.

Parents, learn about the candidates, and their priorities and visions. Community members, you can vote even if you’re not a parent. Support candidates who reflect what you care about in public education.

Chicago is world-famous for our politics — perhaps not always in a good way. But for many of our neighbors, LSC elections fly under the radar. They date back to the late 1980s, when then-Mayor Harold Washington led an effort to better share power among staff, families and neighborhoods in schools.

Every CPS school has an LSC, and every two years, Chicago undertakes one of the largest local elections in the country, where parents, staff, community members and students vote for representatives.

We are leaders of our neighborhood elementary school’s LSC. Working together, we are building a place where children thrive.

LSCs are elected bodies — mini school boards made up of parents, teachers, neighbors and students. They do not run schools directly but have real power and responsibility. LSCs vote on school improvement plans, approve school budgets, and evaluate or hire principals. They provide rare spaces to hear one another’s perspectives and strengthen school communities.

Coming out of the pandemic, we saw that children urgently needed support both emotionally and academically. We made these priorities in our school’s improvement plan, and voted to invest in social-emotional learning and academic intervention to help students recover.

Recently, student musicians performed a Women’s History Month rock show; eighth graders held a debate about the death penalty in literature class; and students stayed after school to rehearse for the spring play.

These came from LSC decisions to invest in after-school programs, arts positions, bilingual education and bringing parent mentors into classrooms.

No matter where you live in Chicago, you have a neighborhood school, and that means you have an LSC. Make sure you vote March 18!

Ben Dieterich, local school council chair, and Seth Lavin, principal, Brentano Math & Science Academy

Nonviolence needs to be political ideal everywhere

Democracy is in decline across the globe. Extremism is rising, strongman politics is gaining appeal, and disagreements too often harden into hatred. The warning signs are everywhere.

This moment calls us back to the moral tradition shared by Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Jesse Jackson — a lineage rooted in the power of disciplined nonviolence. Gandhi called his philosophy Satyagraha, or truth-force: the belief that moral courage and collective action can confront injustice without reproducing cycles of violence.

Gandhi’s ideas did not remain confined to India. They helped shape the American Civil Rights Movement. King studied Gandhi’s strategy carefully and visited India in 1959, later calling him “the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.”

Chicago became an important center of that tradition. For decades, Jackson — King’s protégé — expanded the practice of nonviolence beyond protest. Through coalition-building and economic justice advocacy, Jackson showed that love and democracy must be defended in the streets and within institutions of power.

Today, the stakes are global. Even in India, the land Gandhi helped liberate, extremist ideologies have gained ground. Around the world, including in the U.S., democratic norms are being tested by intolerance, disinformation and the influence of political funding.

Chicago's South Asian American Coalition to Renew Democracy Acts, or SACRED Acts, has taken up this charge locally. As part of the Season for Nonviolence, it launched a pledge urging candidates and elected officials to reject financial support from organizations tied to extremist, caste-supremacist or hate-based ideologies.

At a public news conference at which I delivered the keynote, 50-plus local leaders joined my call to reject funding from anti-democratic groups like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a right-wing paramilitary group that planned the assassination of my great-grandfather. While I feel disappointment at prominent leaders who did not sign on, those who did sign on reaffirmed their commitment to expose money trails that undermine democratic values — whether in India or the U.S.

This effort reflects the same moral lineage that shaped Gandhi, King and Jackson: the belief that nonviolence is not only a personal ethic but a public responsibility. Nonviolence or nonexistence is not merely a slogan. It is a choice about the kind of democracy we will build — and whether we will defend it together.

Tushar Gandhi, founder, Mahatma Gandhi Foundation, Mumbai, India

‘Nothing left to target’

Dear President Trump: I heard on CNN last week that you said, via Axios, there was "practically nothing left" to target in Iran.

When I was in Vietnam in 1969, at age 19, I suggested to our top sergeant the way to end the war was to bomb the country, grid square by grid square, until there would be nothing left to target.

We could have used you to end that war, six years before it actually ended. Oh, I forgot: bone spurs. Five cases of them. It must have been tough to live with them.

Calogero Lombardo, Old Irving Park