Maggie Owens’ 4-year-old daughter was knocking on the back door, desperate to go to school.
Her daughter, Louise, a student with special needs with a brain disorder, was one of the first schoolchildren to return to her classroom last month. But then, two and a half weeks after the phased district reopening plan began, a conflict between the city and the teachers’ union forced everyone to go back to remote education, and Owens told Louise that she would have to go back to learning at home. computer.
“She just lost control. She started to cry, “recalled Mrs. Owens, adding:” She had gotten into a routine, she was happy and then we just pulled her out. “
After an almost two-week break from face-to-face classes, the Chicago Public Schools and its teachers’ union reached an interim agreement to avoid a strike after educators refused to work in person without further security concessions during the pandemic.
If completed, the district said the deal, announced on Sunday, would allow some 3,000 kindergarten students and some special education classrooms – like Owens’ daughter – to return on Thursday. The district is the third largest in the country, with 340,000 public school students.
Owens, who lives in the northwest corner of the city, said he was pleased that a deal had been struck. But she was frustrated with the district and the union for allowing the conflict to turn into a crisis.
“I feel that what is being lost in this is that there are real people and real children who are being harmed by this,” she said. “And I feel like my daughter is one of them.”
The Chamber of Delegates of the Chicago Teachers’ Union, a leadership body of about 800 members, voted on Monday night to send the deal to the city for ratification by all 25,000 members. The base will vote electronically, with results expected by midnight on Tuesday.
The agreement allows all pre-school students up to the eighth grade, as well as some disabled high school students, to return to schools in the coming weeks.
As part of the deal, the city pledged to offer 2,000 doses of coronavirus vaccine this week to classroom staff who were due to reopen on Thursday and any other staff living with people who were at high risk for the virus. It would then provide 1,500 doses a week to school officials for the following weeks.
Teachers who do not have students attending face-to-face classes can continue to teach remotely, and unvaccinated teachers can take unpaid leave for the next quarter, instead of teaching in person. The agreement also set limits on what would cause the district, as well as individual schools or classrooms, to temporarily return to distance learning.
A similar battle took place on Monday in Philadelphia, where teachers conducted remote learning in the cold outside dozens of school buildings to protest what the union called an unsafe reopening plan.
Philadelphia is scheduled to bring kindergarten students in second grade back to schools on February 22, and teachers in those grades are due to report to buildings on Monday. But the local union instructed them to stay at home, preparing for a confrontation.
At the last minute, Mayor Jim Kenney said teachers did not have to work in person while a mediator analyzed the district’s reopening plan.
In Chicago, Willie Preston, a father of six who lives on the South Side, said his youngest daughter, Lear, who is in kindergarten, was also caught in limbo after her school briefly reopened last month and then closed again. One morning, she was enthusiastically preparing for school when his wife had to break the news to her.
“She started to cry and pout, why can’t she go to school? “And we had to talk to her and try to explain that the adults are fighting over whether she can go back to school or not.”
He said he had not yet told Lear that she could probably go back to school on Thursday if the union voted against the deal and the district returned to chaos.
“For me and my wife, one of the most important things for us and our children is stability,” he said. “I don’t want to do this to our 4-year-old daughter until I have a high degree of certainty that she will be back.”
Ellen Almer Durston contributed reports.