Organizations allied with the Chicago Teachers Union and some state lawmakers are calling for limits on campaign spending as big money, some from billionaires, is being used to bombard voters with texts and fliers about the city’s primary school board elections.

Elected officials said Monday they plan to work on campaign finance legislation in Springfield. But those efforts will face headwinds, given the U.S. Supreme Court’s stance that limiting election spending challenges free speech.

The complaints come in response to millions of dollars raised and spent by super PACs, or political action committees, that support opposing candidates. CTU-approved hopefuls. Unlike regular PACs, these super PACs have no donation limits and do not need to coordinate with individual campaigns. Significant contributions to these funds came from wealthy individuals and a few billionaires, some of whom did not live in Chicago or Illinois.

The teachers union and its affiliated PACs spent about the same amount as opposition groups last month but argued they have a larger stake in the school system’s future.

“I sat down and fought for our children to get a decent education,” Jeri Hayes, the mother of five CPS students, told reporters at a news conference. “I’ve never seen a billionaire’s kid in the Chicago public school system. So how do I expect a billionaire to understand what we are going through and what our children are going through?”

About a dozen elected officials attended the news conference outside the high-rise building on Michigan Avenue that houses the Illinois Charter Schools Network, which advocates for publicly funded, privately run charter schools. Some supporters forged large-sized fake checks, from “The Waltons” and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings to “INCS and their privatization candidates.”

Jim Walton, billionaire heir to the Walmart family fortune, last used his Arkansas address to contribute $400,000 to the INCS super PAC on Oct. 3, election records show. He gave the group $350,000 earlier this year and has donated $2.3 million to INCS since 2016. Hastings, who lives in California, donated $100,000 in July.

INCS and Urban Center Action (the other super PAC orchestrating the spending in question) had a combined $3.6 million by the end of September, records show. At that point, 31 candidates contributed a total of $1.3 million in cash.

INCS’s fundraising efforts since July have come from three people: Hastings; another $100,000 from Chicago-based Craig Duchossois, president of his family’s investment firm; and $500,000 from Chicago philanthropist Helen Zell, widow of real estate mogul Sam Zell. Contributors to the Urban Center are mostly wealthy Chicago business executives.

The two groups have spent at least $2.7 million on school board elections since July; the vast majority of this (more than $2 million) occurred in the last four weeks.

INCS and Urban Center Action hit back Monday, saying it was the teachers union that tried to buy the election. Urban Center Action said the union and its president, Stacy Davis, Gates “have had free reign of our communities for too long.” No more!”

Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ analysis shows CTU and affiliated PACs have spent about $1.9 million since Oct. 1. The vast majority of CTU’s political income comes from contributions under $150, often a portion of union dues that teachers choose to send to the political fund. The union funneled six-figure sums to United Working Families PAC and Our Schools PAC, both of which spent on the same candidates.

State Sen. Robert Martwick (D-Chicago), who sponsored the school board bill, said lawmakers are considering some campaign finance limits because both Democratic and Republican lawmakers are concerned about the influence of outside money.

“Everybody knew that if a school district as important as the public schools in Chicago is corrupted by outside money, it doesn’t lead to good results, and that’s exactly what we’re doing here,” he said.

But Martwick said he and others decided creating Chicago’s first elected school board was revolutionary and complex enough for a single bill. He said they prefer to address issues in future bills, including campaign finance, whether noncitizens can vote and whether board members should be paid.

None of these items have yet been resolved.

Progressive activists are pushing three measures in Springfield. These include a limit on contributions from out of state. They want the top five contributors to any super PAC disclosed in campaign ads. And they want some form of public financing for political campaigns. These attempts to restrict spending are likely to face legal challenges.

Some MPs were particularly disturbed by the granting of money. U.S. Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., said her first experience as a politician was knocking on doors to collect petitions in support of an elected school board. While in the Illinois Legislature, he was the lead House sponsor of the bill.

“Billionaires who want to privatize education tell us they have the best interest of our communities in mind. “We say this is a lie,” he said.

In response, the INCS super PAC called these attacks “lies.” The group said the candidates it supports have more grassroots support than candidates with ties to the CTU.

“To be clear, INCS Action supports independent, student-centered Democratic candidates who believe that all children in our city deserve access to a high-quality public school, regardless of their zip code, and who will prioritize students over politics,” the group said. “It’s clear that others in our city support this simple idea.”