Beware of the 3rd Largest School District within the US.

It's been reported that Chicago Public Schools (CPS) is on a mission to hire more school social workers to address the growing need for therapeutic services for both the general and special education population.

Here's the thing: CPS will lose out on school social work talent, both short- and long-term for the following reasons:

• Narrowness of responsibilities: A school social worker's primary duties within CPS revolve around special education students. One being psycho-social assessments for IEP/504 initials and reveals. The other is providing therapeutic services to the students found eligible from these assessments. That's it. IEP repots are like TPS reports. If you don't hit your monthly 80% mark for therapeutic services your manager is gonna bark at you. Not to mention the limited amount of assessments that school social workers are allowed to use (SDQ, SISS, BOSS -- seriously never used BOSS once; many social workers just use SDQ; usage of SISS is like spotting a unicorn) for the assessments. They aren't allowed to use BASC-3 since that's assigned to the school psych (did they forget the mantra of "staying in your lane"?) even though school social workers are trained and qualified to administer and score it. Conners, ABAS etc. Nope -- you're never going to use them. I don't think network managers ever used them if they're CPS lifers. Good luck finding opportunities to complete an FIB + BIP. Other districts provide a more well-rounded professional experience. CPS is only good if you want to enter adolescent psychotherapy simply for the fact that if you aren't doing IEP reports you're meeting with your kids on your caseload, honing that clinical part. You are stunted.
• Slow and unprofessional recruiting/hiring process: When one of the hiring manager shrugs his shoulders when asked what's the timeline for the job decision after the interview, saying it'll be about two weeks and "to call" if you haven't heard anything, and when the candidate does contact after the two weeks for an update only to receive silence from both hiring managers (the lead hiring manager and the interviewer), that tells me that they only care about the offers they send out. Education has become corporate. There is a history of candidates who were offered a contract but declined because they accepted jobs in other districts due to said slow hiring process.
• Lack of opportunity to collaborate: There is barely any opportunities to collaborate with school counselors for Tier 1/2 interventions within the MTSS and PBIS system. You're lucky if any collaboration happens.
• Work Environment: For love all things decent and wholesome. IEP/504 cliques. Good grief, let's be honest, a vast majority of those in the counseling department and IEP/504 team are women and they act like it's high school (ironic when it's at the secondary level) - gossip hour before first the bell rings and the still-single-in-my-late-30s-because-it's-a-choice/divorce club. You will simply dread slow days (NWEA testing, semester finals, AP testing week, Report Card pick-ups, last few days of school) because that's where the "have you heard that Kim is getting a separation from her husband of six years? She's moving out. Yes. She's moving out," all in a hushed voice. And, I bet, the divorced clinician is giving the soon to be divorcee life advice. Spare me now. 
• Turn over rate is relatively high. How many are on the pay-roll earning the capped salary, or close to it? Not many. This is because a vast majority leave before their 10 year mark for greener pastures. New Trier. Hinsdale. Orland Park. Naperville. Elmhurst. You get the idea. A bulk of the employees are earning mid-step salaries, either between year 5-7. There's good probability they'll leave because they're simply bored out of their minds on how they're being used. CPS makes school social work feel like it's a desk job with the same old routine.

If it weren't for the decent pay, decent annual raises (approx $3K per year thanks to CTU), and pension package, CPS would be a bigger disaster than it already is. But here's the catch: In order to obtain the full pension of your capped salary you need to dedicate 34 years of your life to the system. 34 years. That's literally your entire working career. Your entire career will be within one school district that restricts a "jack of all trades" type of a degree to two duties solely relating to special education. They dangle the financial and pension benefits in front of you but you have to sell your soul to the system. I suppose the upside, professionally, is experiencing a wider variety of mental disorders found within the DSM. The (ethnic) diversity claim is overrated since the schools you're going to be at will either be majority African-American or Hispanic. Depending on the neighborhood you may get a white kid on your caseload.