Situation Update: February 14, 2022
By Contributing Writer Linda Prestia
CHICAGO, Ill. Feb 14, 2022 --- The Chicago Public Schools Superintendent Pedro Martinez, 51, who has been on the job about five months, is clearly doing the bidding of unpopular Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who appointed him from a pool of 25 applicants.
Martinez departed from a San Antonio, Tex. School district last fall, to assume his “dream job’ as Superintendent of CPS “in my hometown of Chicago,” he reportedly said to the San Antonio Report in September 2021.
Chicago Mayor Lightfoot welcomed Martinez, “a son of Chicago, back home” at a press conference held at the start of the school year. Lightfoot said at the time it was important for the school district of about 340,000 students, be led by “someone who embodies excellence and also has lived experience similar to the students” he serves every day. Chicago is the nation’s third largest school district.
Martinez was previously the CPS Chief Financial Officer from 2003-2009 under Arne Duncan, the man who helped usher in the disastrous “Common Core” agenda nationwide, while he sent his own children to pricey private schools in Chicago.
Martinez took the reins at CPS amid declining enrollment, hefty budget shortfall issues, and an ongoing pandemic that persisted into the launch of a new school year in Chicago in the fall of 2021.
What many in Chicago are unaware of is that Martinez departed his prior superintendent job amid a tumultuous time of public defiance, overstepping his power, and resistance to leadership elected by the will of the people of Texas.
The State of Texas had filed a lawsuit against Martinez and the San Antonio Independent School District (SAISD) for violating state law by requiring district employees to be vaccinated by the experimental vaccines. Martinez was Superintendent of the SAISD from June 2015-Sept. 2021.
Martinez sent a letter August 16, 2021 to the San Antonio school district staff claiming it was time for the district to “lead by example,” and gave the staff until October 15, 2021 to comply with his unlawful requirement of coerced vaccination.
Then Martinez sent another letter to parents in San Antonio declaring his intent to issue a mask mandate for the district, and publicly reiterated that his mask mandate would remain in place regardless of the outcome of the San Antonio and Bexar County lawsuit against the governor’s ban on mask mandates.
The state of Texas in their orders accused Martinez and SAISD of “challenging policy choices made by the State’s commander in chief during times of disaster.”
Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order in July 2021 forbidding government agencies from requiring the experimental coronavirus vaccine "administered under an emergency use authorization (EUA)."
As reported, the EUA has allowed the experimental vaccine manufacturers to bypass normal extended periods of testing of the vaccines and also affords the manufacturers, and those pushing the vaccines, a shield from liability if people are injured or die from the experimental vaccines.
Following the showdown with Martinez, attorneys for the state of Texas requested a temporary restraining order barring the San Antonio district from enforcing its vaccine requirement.
Martinez reportedly said he was very proud that during his last year at the San Antonio district they didn’t see children getting hospitalized from COVID, alluding to the time he had the district unconstitutionally masked up.
However, Martinez refused to acknowledge the widely reported data that finds children have a 99.9% survival rate after contracting the infection.
All the while this legal battle was going on in Texas, Martinez was in talks with CPS and Mayor Lightfoot interviewing for the top Superintendent spot in Chicago.
Upon the opportunity given to him to flee Texas amid the lawsuit he spurred with the state Governor and AG, Martinez landed another opportunity to implement his same tyrannical orders in another state, this time in Illinois, where the Democrat Governor JB Pritzker was pushing the same unconstitutional mandates he supported. This time, Martinez’s rollout of mandates and coerced vaccinations of staff was met with no legal resistance from his tyrannical democrat allies in the Illinois AG and Governor’s office.
Martinez did an interview with The 74 Million Organization, where he said “…this was allowed to be politicized,” while he reflected on his battle with the Texas Governor, Chicago’s union, mass coercion of vaccines and mask mandates.
The organization asked Martinez to share his take on those milestones for vaccines for teachers, and then students, and the mask mandates that clashed with Texas Gov. Abbott.
“The (Texas) union was really fighting to keep the schools closed. We had, on the other side, the state (of Texas) forcing us to stay open, threatening us that they would cut all of our funding if we didn’t open the schools. And then I had some different views from families, from taxpayers. It was all over the board and I remember just feeling caught in the middle. At the end, we had to decide what was in the best interest of both our staff and our children, with children being the priority. So we decided to phase in the staff, then we decided to phase in the students very slowly. We took stands on both masking and eventually on vaccines that I still feel very, very strongly about,” Martinez told The 74 Million Organization.
“I talked to staff around [the governor]. In the end, the biggest fight was with the attorney general. There were letters, it was all in writing. They would send a letter threatening us. Our lawyers would respond. Then we would make a public statement. It was more politics than it was anything else. It was never really a true, honest conversation,” he said.
Martinez admitted in the interview and is on the record that he felt “very strongly” about the vaccines during his time at San Antonio and now in Chicago. His strong, unwavering feelings of being pro-vaccination have no room to be challenged either.
This declaration of strong support for experimental vaccines by Martinez is clearly reaffirmed when you see how he previously reacted to a November 2021 letter sent out to parents and staff from the Commandant at one military academy under the umbrella of CPS, who alerted parents of children to research the government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) with their doctors before taking any experimental vaccine. (See letter in image)
Martinez opted to have zero communication directly with the Commandant, “no true honest conversation,” as he might say, following the release of the Commandant letter to parents via email.
Instead, Martinez briskly responded in the same fashion that he hypocritically moaned about experiencing with the Texas AG’s office just a few months earlier.
According to the letter sent out by Commandant Larry Kaifesh, a retired Marine Colonel, he urged parents to consider the fact that COVID recovery by children was 99.9% and that the vaccines were still experimental. (See letter in image)
Kaifesh essentially promoted informed consent with parents before blindly taking the direction of Superintendent Martinez, who is not a doctor but rather a highly paid bureaucrat appointed by a very partisan mayor.
Martinez apparently wanted parents not to have any knowledge of the VAERS data, which is a national early warning system to detect possible safety problems in U.S.-licensed vaccines.
It would be appropriate for the VAERS data to be shared as often as they command, “get the vaccine.”
Martinez, however, publicly stated to the Block Chicago Club that he dubbed the letter Colonel Kaifesh sent to the parents with VAERS data, as “false information.” In fact, many parents reached out to Colonel Kaifesh in appreciation for sharing such invaluable information on the experimental vaccine, such as number of deaths and hospitalizations. The experimental vaccine is not safe and presents significant risk, while the long-term effects are unknown to everyone, even the vaccine manufacturers.
Speaking to reporters in Chicago November 30, 2021 alongside Dr. Allison Arwady, the commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health, Martinez said Kaifesh has been removed from the school for “spreading false information about vaccines, which is contrary to everything Dr. Arwady and I have been preaching and speaking about.”
Colonel Kaifesh, was terminated on January 28, 2022 without a listed reason. The only logical explanation, is that Martinez and CPS did not want the parents and students to know of the risks of the experimental vaccine, provided by a government funded data base that acts as an early warning system.
It is malfeasance for any authority to promote the benefit of any drug or vaccine, without also including the risks, especially an experimental vaccine with new and growing risks daily.
According to Kaifesh, who is considering legal action for the wrongful termination, his attorney is currently reviewing the fallacy of the firing and seeking clarification from CPS.
In a review of Martinez’s actions in the past several months, it appears that Martinez believes there is no room to have opposition opinions or data that might contradict what he “preaches.” His agenda is simply to relentlessly coerce mass vaccinations of staff and children K through high school, no questions asked.
And this agenda mirrors the same agenda we saw coming out the Illinois’ Governor’s office, as well as the Democratic Biden Administration in Washington D.C. that recently lost its forced vaccination case in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Shortly after CPS's head Martinez was appointed by Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot in September 2021, he gave the entire school district a day off for vaccinations.
Martinez stated in his own email to parents, "The day that so many parents have been waiting for, myself included, is finally here! The CDC has approved COVID vaccines for children ages 5 to 11.”
Nowhere in that letter did he state the alarming data that was also being compiled by the VAERS site on the experimental vaccines that showed alarming rates of injuries and deaths.
“Critically examining the possible reasons why we see systemic dereliction of duty among the CPS ranks, we can suspect many will claim ignorance when the damage is all said and done. However, Martinez is now on record as discounting the mounting VAERS data, ignoring his moral duty, and doubling down on having no interest in sharing the dire government data with parents. Martinez has sidelined safety, brushing off vaccine injury and mortality data as ‘misinformation’ while he advocates for Big Pharma,” wrote Kaifesh in an article he published in American Thinker recapping the tyrannical and dangerous actions of Martinez.
To many who hold their constitutional rights and freedoms sacred, the hypocrisy is jarring of those unelected bureaucrats who act to impede free people’s right to choose.
Martinez is simply emboldened to repeat his same unlawful pattern of tyranny in Illinois knowing he will have support this time by the same likeminded bureaucrats and politicians, unlike the legal pushback he got in Texas.
Knowing he has that support of partisans around him, Martinez heads up CPS with very little tolerance to opposition to his viewpoints formed in lockstep with his highly partisan boss Mayor Lightfoot.
He knows he won’t be challenged by the left wing media, politicians, career bureaucrats, and all of those who have taken money from the Big Pharma vaccine manufacturers, as well as those who hold the purse strings for the money allocated to the school districts under the strict guidelines of following their set rules not based on science at all, but rather a partisan agenda largely formulated with wealthy globalists.
Examining his education background, CEO Martinez earned his M.B.A. from DePaul University in Chicago and his Bachelor of Science in Accounting from the University of Illinois. There is no experience on his resume as a teacher or principle before being installed as a school district superintendent years ago. But he did complete an “alternative” certification process from The Broad Superintendent Academy.
The Broad Academy he graduated from is a foundation established in 1999 by billionaire Eli Broad, who made his fortune in real estate and the insurance business. The Gates Foundation, the Walton Family and the Broad Foundation formed to strategically deploying their wealth through training school leaders, financing think-tank reports and supporting advocacy groups that would pivot education reform into their desired direction during the past few decades.
Martinez’ secured a training program with the Broad Academy that was held during six weekends over ten months, after which he graduated and then the doors flew open for him to be placed into large districts as superintendents. Those accepted into the Broad Academy are not required to have a background in-education. And all of his tuition, travel expenses were paid by the Broad Center, which also sometimes covers a share of the graduates’ salaries when they are appointed into district leadership positions. (Some critics viewed this as a built-in incentive to entice districts to hire their graduates.)
After Martinez received his “alternative certification,” he secured a job before his time in San Antonio, at the Washoe County School District in Nevada.
It was in this school district he was fired, or reportedly “relieved of his duties” by the Washoe County School Board members regarding an apparent dispute about his credentials as a certified public accountant. Martinez publicly referred to the firing as a “misunderstanding.” He then moved to hire a lawyer and filed a lawsuit against the school for illegal termination.
His attorney at the time William Peterson of Reno, Nevada sent the school district a scathing letter to seek damages for the alleged wrongful termination.
“The District and its Trustees have violated both Nevada law and the employment agreement with Mr. Martinez,” Peterson wrote.
"Government is supposed to be completely transparent; that's why we have elected officials who are required to basically conduct their affairs in public in the sunlight, so we all know what is going on so we can hold them accountable," Peterson said in an interview with the Reno Gazette Journal.
Martinez’s lawyer in that case is right about one thing, that the government and its officials are supposed to be completely transparent so the people they work for, the taxpayers, can hold them accountable.
It is dereliction of duty, malfeasance not to address the VAERs data with parents, who may not be educated on the existence of the database since the partisan Biden Administration also suspiciously refuses to address the data publicly. And that is despite the several public Senate hearings that have occurred with Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin with legitimate people who have been injured by the vaccines and legitimate doctors who have seen the damage still being caused, with the vaccine injury data rising every day.
Since Martinez has no interest in reviewing the VAERS data, it is sketchy to many that his only expertise on the science of mask mandates and experimental vaccines is derived from the same partisan talking points churned out by Mayor Lightfoot, Big Pharma, compromised politicians who took money from Big Pharma and from Bill Gates and his foundation, that not only funded Martinez’s Superintendent certification stint, but also publicly stated ‘vaccines are the best investment I ever made.’