Just before 1 a.m. Friday, in the closing hours of the Illinois Senate’s spring session, lawmakers hastily passed an amendment giving themselves an additional nine months to finalize Chicago Public Schools’ new elected school board map, blowing through a deadline that has been on the calendar for almost two years.

In 2021, Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed into law a bill that will shift the board from a seven-person panel appointed by the mayor, as it has been for decades, to a 21-member elected board by 2026. Legislators gave themselves until July 1 to draw a map of 20 districts from which the Board of Education members will be elected — the 21st seat will be the president chosen by citywide vote — but planning issues, disagreement between the two chambers and fears of a lack of representation forced an 11th-hour delay.

“I think the nine-month extension, while it’s not ideally what you want from the get-go, I think as long as it provides the best product for these maps and still gives us enough time to conduct those elections, I think we’ll be in good shape,” state Sen. Robert Martwick, a Northwest Side Chicago Democrat who has long supported this transition, told the Tribune just before the House and Senate voted 69-36 and 36-18, respectively, to extend the deadline. “I think one of the mistakes here is we just didn’t have enough time. We could have started this process earlier.”

Martwick also hinted at a disconnect between the House and Senate.

“I’m waiting to see what the House is going to do, but if that is the House’s pleasure, then I think that’s something that we would consider so that we can continue to work together, maybe with a little less pressure,” he said of the extension. “There are two chambers right now, and apparently there isn’t agreement, and we’ve got to keep working until otherwise.”

State lawmakers were juggling a lot in the waning hours of the session, with a massive budget deal that passed the Senate and passed the House early Saturday, plus a series of other bills that needed attention.

Despite the original July deadline — and the fact that the effective deadline was the end of the spring session this week — Democrat lawmakers waited until May to release their first map draft. That plan prompted objections from community members who felt it had too few Latino-majority districts, given Latino students make up 47% of the Chicago Public Schools’ student body.

“There have been lots of people coming to all of these hearings talking about the needs to represent CPS families,” Taschaunda Hall, with the education-focused nonprofit Kids First Chicago, said at the public hearing on the first draft. “And your maps have completely disregarded their voices.”

Cassie Creswell, who has a child at Jones College Prep and is the director of the advocacy group Illinois Families for Public Schools, told the Tribune she had mixed feelings about the extension, saying, “I’m relieved that they extended the deadline instead of rushing through” a map that lacked community cohesion.

“But that said, they’ve had two years to get this map drawn. It’s not like someone passed the school board bill earlier this session, and so it’s disappointing there wasn’t thought through this process earlier than this because it’s not a surprise to anyone that they need maps by July 1,” Creswell added.

Raise Your Hand for Illinois Public Education is one of the main grassroots groups that has supported this transition to an elected body. Director Jianan Shi hopes this extension will create a better map in the end.

“We are relieved that Illinois lawmakers have voted to extend the deadline,” Shi said. “I think this gives them the opportunity to go back to the drawing board and design maps that actually reflect the diversity of the students and create maps that center the families that have been historically most harmed by mayoral control.”

Community members have been voicing their concerns about the map, with some even submitting their own proposals.

But drawing 20 districts that are “substantially equal in population,” as the law demands, and that provide proportionate racial representation while also keeping neighborhoods intact is a difficult process, lawmakers say.

State Rep. Ann Williams, a Chicago Democrat who leads the districting process, said this deadline extension was necessary to draw the maps the right way.

“We believe that in order to create the strongest possible map and ensure all Chicagoans are able to elect the candidates that best represent their values, our work must continue,” she said in a statement.

The transition to a fully elected board will involve two election cycles. Under the current law, in the 2024 election, the city will be carved into 10 districts, from which one board member will be elected for a four-year term and a second one will be appointed by Mayor Brandon Johnson for a two-year term. Those appointed seats will then be up for election in 2026.

Williams says lawmakers remain on track to have maps in place for the 2024 and 2026 elections.

The vast majority of school boards around the country and the state are elected.

Former Mayor Lori Lightfoot had previously supported the idea of an elected school board but rejected the 21-member plan as too large.

“It’s interesting that this is supposed to be about democracy but what happened in Springfield had nothing to do with democracy. But democracy, mark my word, will prevail,” she said when the bill was passed.

But Johnson supports the shift and will be the first mayor to deal with the new elected system.

While the new deadline will be April, barring a veto from Pritzker, Martwick hopes lawmakers will learn from their mistakes and produce a map well before that date.