Balancing Act: I'm a CPS mom surrounded by CPS families. We don't want to be pitted against our teachers — or our mayor — during this strike

I'm proud of us, Chicago.

It's the second week of the Chicago Public Schools teacher strike and I'm seeing a whole lot of interested parties resist the temptation to turn this into a simple tale of villains and heroes.

It's anything but.

It's a union of teachers tasked with shaping and educating 300,000 students, many of whom arrive at school carrying tremendous trauma and challenges. It's those same teachers asking for the sorts of resources that many schools around the country take for granted: nurses, librarians, social workers, class sizes that don't balloon to more than 30