After “substantial progress” was made in negotiations between the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers’ Union on Monday, it was announced that teachers will not be prevented from accessing the Google Suite on Monday night, with virtual learning continuing for students for at least the next two days.
According to an email from CPS, students will have distance learning on Tuesday and Wednesday as negotiations continue, with the teacher’s block now out of the question.
“We have reached another important milestone today in our efforts to provide face-to-face learning to our students in the Chicago Public Schools system,” Mayor Lori Lightfoot and CPS director Dr. Janice Jackson said in a statement. “We secured an agreement on one of them. Another open question and made substantial progress on a structure that we hope will address the remaining issues. We request a 48-hour cooling-off period which, hopefully, will lead to a final resolution on all open issues. . ”
The news came after an ultimatum delivered on Sunday by Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who said the CPS would be prepared to “act” if teachers did not show up in their classrooms on Monday.
In the midst of the often tense negotiations, teachers voted in January to return to remote education, even with pre-K and collective students already back in class. This vote was taken in response to CPS’s request for teachers to return to K-8 classrooms on January 25, with students returning to these classrooms on February 1.
CPS officials said over the weekend that if teachers did not return to schools on Monday, they would be considered “absent without leave” and would not be allowed to conduct distance learning until they report to their classrooms.
“All teachers, from pre-primary to eight and teachers in the group, must report,” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot told a news conference on Sunday. “If you don’t have approved accommodation, we hope to see you back to school. Those who don’t report to work … we will have to act. We will avoid this. “
At a virtual press conference late Sunday, the CTU leadership said the outstanding issues include a clear vaccination process and a health metric for teachers’ concerns about the coronavirus.
“People’s lives … depend on achieving maximum security in the middle of a pandemic,” said Stacy Davis Gates, vice president of CTU.
Both sides pointed the finger at a series of social media posts earlier on Sunday, with CTU officials saying that Lightfoot and the CPS leadership told them “not to attend” the negotiations, unless ordinary union members were prepared to make “big concessions”.
In response, the CPS said that its negotiating team was “informed by the CTU leadership that they were not available to meet until they could develop a response to our most recent offer”.
CTU responded to this statement by criticizing Lightfoot for “referring to the ‘hyper-democratic’ nature of CTU” in a negative light, and that the union is seeking leadership from its ordinary members during the current stalemate.
The news comes after both sides reported progress in the negotiations over the weekend. The two sides have been debating for months the safety of teachers and students who return to classrooms in the midst of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, with questions related to vaccination, safety measures and procedures, all at the negotiating table.
Lightfoot insists that the CPS plan to return to schools has been rigorously examined by medical experts, including Chicago Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady, and has been confirmed in charter and Archdiocese classrooms in the city since the autumn, as well as in pre-K and cluster learning classrooms that came back last month.
Lightfoot appeared on “Morning Joe” Monday to make that statement and again blame the union.
“We invested over $ 100 million in ventilation, other safety protocols, making sure we have masks, safety health checks, temperature checks, all the things you would expect, that the CDC guidance told us, that we know how to make sense to mitigate any problems in schools, “she said.
“We had three weeks of safe implementation of our plan until the teachers’ union blew it up,” continued Lightfoot. “We are doing everything we can to address what teachers are expressing to us, but we need them to meet us halfway. As you all know, you need to take steps towards each other. There has to be a half- term. “