With just over a week before the Chicago Board of Education votes on a proposal to close 54 schools, the Chicago Teachers Union and other activist groups said Monday they would hold marches over three days to protest the plan.

The marches will begin Saturday in the South and West side neighborhoods where many schools are slated for closing and culminate in a rally Monday afternoon outside City Hall.

The marches “will continue to unite us, make us stronger and help us focus for the long haul,” CTU President Karen Lewis said at a news conference outside Mayo Elementary, one of the schools CPS wants to close.

Details of the marches were not laid out, and it will be up to the individual school communities to decide how they want to participate, Lewis said.

“Every school has a different way of showing solidarity,” she said.

After months of hearings and numerous protests by the CTU and others, the school board’s vote on the plan to close 53 elementary schools and one high school program is scheduled for May 22.

The union insists that not a single school be closed.

Last week, hearing officers hired by school officials objected to 13 of the proposed closings. The district’s plan is unpopular among residents — a Tribune/WGN-TV poll found that 59 percent of Chicago voters don’t approve of the school closings proposal.

“This is not all teachers involved with this protest,” the Rev. Robert Jones of Mount Carmel Missionary Baptist Church said at Monday’s news conference, where parents, activists and school employees also took turns at the microphone. “It is a community protest that is united with the teachers at every level.”

The Chicago Teachers Union will be holding elections Friday, and it’s expected that Lewis and her Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, or CORE, ticket will retain leadership for a second term.

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