The Chicago Teachers’ Union has reached a provisional agreement with Mayor Lori Lightfoot to partially reopen the city’s schools for face-to-face classes starting this week, the mayor announced on Sunday.
If finalized, the agreement will avoid a strike that threatened to interrupt the teaching of students in the country’s third largest school system. It would also allow pre-school students through eighth grade, in addition to some high school students with severe disabilities, to return to classrooms, although at a slower time than the mayor originally wanted.
Almost all of the city’s 340,000 public school students have been studying remotely since March.
Mrs. Lightfoot, a Democrat, acknowledged on Sunday that the tough fight with the union was particularly tough for her parents. But she said that what the city achieved was vitally important, calling public education “the great equalizer”.
“With the reopening of our school, we have taken an important step in our journey of renewal and recovery,” she said. “We can judge the health of who we are by what we do to support our children.”
Chicago saw one of the harshest examples of battles across the country between elected officials, who are pushing to reopen schools, against unions that say it is not safe to return to buildings before teachers are vaccinated.
A similar struggle is taking place in Philadelphia, where teachers from preschool to second grade are due to attend school buildings on Monday to prepare for the students’ return on February 22. The teachers’ union told its members to continue working remotely.
In San Francisco, where schools remain closed and the city is seeking an injunction to force the Education Council to produce a reopening plan, the district and the teachers’ union announced a provisional agreement on Sunday about the reopening. The deal requires an additional decline in reports of new coronaviruses in San Francisco – where they are already lower than in many other cities across the country – before students return to classrooms, so the time for any reopening is not yet over. clear.
Under the Chicago agreement, pre-school students and students with severe disabilities would return to classrooms on Thursday. These students had been in school for two and a half weeks in January before the dispute over Covid-19’s security measures sent them home again.
Employees who work from kindergarten to fifth grade classrooms would return on February 22, and students in those grades would return on March 1. Team members from sixth through eighth grade would return on March 1st and students on March 8th. no plans yet to return most high school students to classrooms.
The deal is yet to be approved by a group of about 800 elected union leaders known as the House of Delegates; a vote is expected on Monday. Then, the deal would go to a ratification vote by about 25,000 union members on Tuesday.
Ms. Lightfoot argued that many of the city’s most vulnerable children have struggled with remote learning and that the reopening of schools was instrumental in enabling them to reach their potential. The union countered that the mayor was putting teachers, students and their families in danger.
The argument also took on a racial element, with the union arguing that the mayor, who is black, was serving the small minority of white parents in the district, who chose to send their children back to school for face-to-face classes at higher rates than black or Hispanic parents in the district. Approximately 60% of the predominantly black and Hispanic families in the district chose to keep their children learning remotely after schools reopened, and the union accused the mayor of ignoring these families’ concerns.
The interim agreement provides that the district will pause face-to-face learning for two weeks if the city’s rate of positive coronavirus tests increases markedly and consistently over a week and exceeds 10% on the seventh day. He says that an individual class would temporarily return to distance learning if it had a positive case present while contagious, and that an entire school would temporarily return to distance learning if it had three positive cases in three different classrooms over a period of 14 days period.
The city agreed to speed up the vaccination of teachers and other school staff. That would include offering 2,000 doses next week for staff in classrooms that are due to reopen on Thursday, and for all employees living with people who are at high risk for complications from Covid-19.
Under the agreement, teachers who do not have face-to-face students can teach remotely, and other teachers who have not yet been vaccinated can take unpaid leave for the next quarter, instead of returning to teach in person.
All face-to-face employees will be tested for coronavirus at least every two weeks, and school staff in neighborhoods with the highest rates of the virus will be tested weekly. Students in these schools, as well as high school students with severe disabilities, will be tested once a month.
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the umbrella union for residents of Chicago and San Francisco, said on Sunday that the deals in those cities marked an important turning point.
“It sends a strong message that, although there have been tensions and we are in the middle of the pandemic – there is a lot of tension and a lot of fear – that when the sides can come together and see solutions and follow the roadmap, we can safely reopen schools. “