In this Monday, Oct. 10, 2016 photo, Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis announces that a tentative contract agreement was reached with Chicago Public Schools at the SEIU Healthcare headquarters in Chicago. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune via AP)
In this Monday, Oct. 10, 2016 photo, Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis announces that a tentative contract agreement was reached with Chicago Public Schools at the SEIU Healthcare headquarters in Chicago. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune via AP) Credit: Armando L. Sanchez

Chicago — Teachers in the nation’s third-largest school district pulled back from a threatened strike after a tentative last-minute contract agreement that Chicago officials acknowledged on Tuesday may amount to a temporary fix and parents worried would fall apart.

“It wasn’t easy, as you all know,” Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said after Monday’s late-night agreement, which now goes to the union’s House of Delegates and all 28,000 members for a final vote. Vice President Jesse Sharkey said on Tuesday that he’s “confident that it’ll pass” because it has wins for students and for school workers.

But even as Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who fought bitterly with Lewis before and during the 2012 teachers’ strike, praised the union and the Chicago Public Schools in a speech in which he introduced his 2017 budget proposal, it still isn’t clear how the financially strapped city will pay for the four-year deal.

The proposal includes a 2 percent cost-of-living increase in the third year and 2.5 percent one in the fourth year. It doesn’t require current teachers to pay more toward their pensions — a change CPS had been seeking and the union rejected earlier this year — but future hires will have to pick up that additional pension cost.

A key provision is an agreement by the city to divert about $88 million from a $175 million surplus of the city’s at-times controversial special taxing districts — known as tax increment financing, or TIF, funds — to the schools. That figure is less than the $200 million in additional spending the union had sought.

“Obviously when you take that TIF surplus, that’s not a sustainable way of funding the schools,” said Alderman Pat Dowell, who represents South Side neighborhoods. “The money probably will not available next year so the (union and the school district) are going to have to look for more permanent financing, which is probably at the state level.”

Alderman Patrick O’Connor agreed with Dowell, but said the city is in the same position it is in every year when it tries to secure state funding. Illinois is locked in a budget stalemate, meaning funds that are normally available have been slow to come or temporarily cut off.