Who Is Running for School Board in District 6A?

Three candidates are on the ballot for the single District 6A seat on the Chicago Board of Education: Brenda Lee Anderson, Anusha Thotakura and Isaiah White. The winner serves a two-year term. Below are their stated positions from the Sun-Times/Chalkbeat questionnaires, their endorsements, and their campaign finances as reported to the Illinois State Board of Elections, with a link to every source.

Where they stand

Answers as submitted to the 2026 Sun-Times / Chalkbeat / WBEZ / Block Club questionnaire. Every answer links to the candidate's published questionnaire, where the full explanation appears in their own words.

Watch them answer the same questions

On October 21, 2026, all three candidates took identical questions at the Chicago Board of Education candidate forum hosted by Chicago Votes, the Chicago Black Voters Project, the Chicago Education Alliance, the League of Women Voters and Mikva Challenge. Each link below opens the video at the moment that candidate begins their answer, so you can hear them in their own words rather than ours. The District 6A segment runs from 45:27 to 91:28.

Timestamps are the start of each candidate's answer. Answer order rotated so no candidate always went first or last. Source: Chicago Board of Education 2026 Candidate Forums (full video).

Who has endorsed them

Who is funding them

From each committee's Q3 2026 D-2 quarterly report (July 1 – September 30, filed October 15) and A-1 reports, which disclose every contribution of $1,000 or more within days of receipt. A-1 figures are through October 23, 2026. Click a committee name for its full ISBE record.

*Our Schools PAC's $18,807.30 of October 2 appears in one A-1 filing as a cash transfer and in another as an in-kind mailing; it is counted once in the total above. If both are distinct, Thotakura's October total is higher. Figures are rounded to the dollar. Candidate committees in Illinois may accept up to $7,300 per individual per election cycle.

Who White's largest donors are

Four of the people who gave Isaiah White the legal maximum also funded the outside groups now spending on his behalf. Each row links to the Illinois State Board of Elections record where the contribution appears.

Put together: the Finnegans, Frank and Weinberg gave White's committee $36,200 directly, gave $58,400 to the charter-school PAC that in turn gave White $8,000 and paid for his ballot-access work, and Paul Finnegan alone gave $419,700 to the independent committee buying his ads. INCS Action PAC's other 2026 donors include Allstate CEO Thomas Wilson and Jill Garling of the Wilson Garling Foundation, $14,600 each. Common Ground Collective IEC's largest funder is GCM Grosvenor CEO Michael Sacks, at more than $6.4 million since December 2025.

Affiliations are as stated on the donors' own ISBE contribution records (occupation and employer fields) or on the linked public pages. Noble Academy, a Noble Schools charter, is one of the 14 schools inside District 6A.

Outside spending: the biggest number in the race

Independent expenditures are ads bought for a candidate by a committee the candidate does not control. They are reported by the spender, not the campaign, so they never appear in a candidate's own totals. In District 6A, one committee is doing it: Common Ground Collective IEC, the independent-expenditure arm of the PAC funded largely by billionaire Michael Sacks, has reported $175,726 in digital advertising supporting Isaiah White between September 8 and October 20, in seven buys through Thematic Campaigns of Chicago, including $34,000 on October 13 and $34,000 on October 19.

Anderson raised it on stage at the October 21 forum, holding up a mailer: "One of my opponents, already more than a month before the election, has received over $100,000 from an outside organization... We should be concerned that $100,000 could actually go to bringing back that accelerated reading program over at Franklin." ▶ Watch 74:20

What the money paid for

Two of the three campaigns reported outside groups paying for the work of getting on the ballot. Friends of Isaiah White reported $4,329 of in-kind petition consulting, signature verification, nomination-paper preparation and ballot-access fees from INCS Action, Common Ground Collective and The Urban Center, beginning July 8. Community for Brenda Anderson reported $1,372 of in-kind legal support from CTU PAC on July 18 for defending her petitions against a ballot challenge, help CTU offered to every candidate. Neighbors for Anusha reported no ballot-access in-kind support. All three figures are from the committees' own Q3 filings, linked above.

The $175,726 Common Ground Collective IEC has spent on White's behalf is more than five times what his own committee has raised, and more than all three candidates' committees combined. Chalkbeat has reported that White said he has not discussed priorities with these groups.