Hilario Dominguez
Non-partisanQ6 How do you view the role of science in K-12 education? What policies or investments, do you support, or have supported to ensure and improve the quality science instruction for students, and explain why these are your policies?
Science should be a core subject in every CPS school (starting in Kindergarten) rather than something that happens when the schedule allows, and right now it is not rolled out evenly. Some of our schools have labs, equipment, and a teacher with a real science background, while others have one teacher covering science alongside three other subjects with no materials and no prep time. Our district is short science teachers, and that shortage hits hardest in the schools that already have the most vacancies.
We have Grow Your Own pathways that can help us develop science teachers from the communities our schools actually serve. We also cannot teach lab science without a working lab. Currently, our buildings are in need of repair and renovation in order to provide contemporary science facilities.
As I said up top, we need to start earlier with Science. Elementary science gets squeezed out by reading and math, and by the time students reach high school we are asking them to cram on a subject that is somewhat new to them.
One of my platform planks is around career pathways. We need more STEM pathways in health care, environmental science, and engineering - built with real employer and union partners and paid work experience - so a student can see where science leads and where it can take them.
Q7 The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become more integrated in the classroom. What policies would you support for AI use by students and teachers in the classroom to ensure that students receive quality science instruction?
I am proud to have signed the three-year moratorium on AI in CPS classrooms, which gives us time to decide the rules ourselves instead of letting vendors decide them for us. Companies are selling into this district faster than we are making policy and creating guardrails. CPS needs a Chief Privacy Officer. Student data is being collected at a scale nobody here is positioned to oversee, and we must protect our students and our families.
In science specifically, there is real risk around implementing AI without these guardrails. Students learning about the scientific process are learning about forming a hypothesis, running an experiment, and reckoning with a result they did not expect. If we hand our students the answer, we skipt the part that actually teaches them to think. Whatever we eventually allow has to protect the PRACTICE of doing science rather than just the science content.
I am a special education teacher, so I know assistive technology can be transformative for students- so I do not want to lump all technology together as “bad”. But we need tools to prove they improve learning rather than that it just saving money or creating “efficiency”.