Rooted
Aida Flores is a lifelong 25th Ward resident and the daughter of Israel and Francisca, immigrants from Guerrero, Mexico. Her father was a union laborer in construction. Her mother was the family caretaker, feeding the families who arrived after them and watching their children so everyone could make it. Aida was raised on 17th Street and Loomis. She became a mother at 14 and relied on WIC, SNAP, and community health centers, the same programs families in this ward depend on today.
She went to Pilsen Community Academy, Orozco Community Academy, and Benito Juarez High School, where she was the student representative to the Local School Council. With her community's support, she became the first Gates Millennium Scholar at Juarez and the first in her family to go to college. She earned degrees from Georgetown and Harvard and has spent her career teaching in the community she has never left.
Built for Service
Aida has spent 15 years as an educator and administrator, running schools with multi-million dollar budgets and the daily operations that keep them open. She expanded Pre-K access and dual-language programming and grew after-school participation to more than half the student body. Working with parents, staff, and elected officials, she secured funding for three new cluster classrooms for students with moderate to severe disabilities.
When the pandemic closed schools, there was no protocol to follow. Aida built one. She researched how districts elsewhere were handling it, reached out to principals across the country and to school leaders in Asia whose campuses had closed first, and brought back what worked before CPS had guidance to give her. Families were hearing more misinformation than information, so she organized her secretaries and staff into a front line of trust-builders and they called families one at a time. Five hundred families were were served at the vaccine clinic she opened in her building. She held more than 40 town halls preparing parents for online school, and her school finished the year at 90%+ attendance.
When ICE enforcement intensified, schools were told the same thing: don't take this on, you don't want the liability, look to the district. The district had no policy. Aida went to the community instead. She brought parents, staff, and community organizers together and built "Solidarity Sidewalks"—coordinated walk times and drop-off windows so undocumented families could get their children to school.
Her peers elected her a Vice-President of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association, the union representing Chicago's principals and assistant principals. She helped win their first collective bargaining rights. She is a Chicago Latino Caucus Foundation Leadership Academy Fellow and an alumnus of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs' Emerging Leaders Program.
A Community Advocate
As a principal, Aida sat in rooms where teachers, parents, and staff wanted different things and all of them were right about something. She learned to hold those disagreements and still deliver, because a school doesn't work unless it works for everyone in it.
The same work continued outside the school. Aida has connected asylum-seeking families to the resources they needed, organized neighborhood cleanups to bring back the habit of neighbors taking care of the block, and started citywide family bike rides after her son said he wanted more family-friendly activities in his neighborhood.
Aida's husband teaches adult education at City Colleges of Chicago and is a union member. Their daughter has spent a decade organizing with young people across Chicago. They raised their children in Pilsen, where they still live.
