CHICAGO – A new roadmap from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to reopen schools in the country during the Covid-19 pandemic was approved on Friday by powerful teacher unions.
“Today, the CDC faced the fear of the pandemic with facts and evidence,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, in a statement. “For the first time since the start of this pandemic, we have a rigorous, science-based roadmap that our members can use to fight for a safe reopening.”
Calling the CDC’s proposals “a tactile and informed plan”, Weingarten said it “has the potential to help school communities across the country stay safe by defining mitigation and accommodation measures and other tools that educators and children they need, so that classrooms can again be vibrant places of learning and involvement. ”
Weingarten’s organization is one of many labor groups that have been highly critical of the Trump administration’s chaotic response to the pandemic.
“It is clear that this set of safeguards should have been done 10 months ago,” said Weingarten, adding that AFT issued recommendations in April similar to those in the CDC plan. “Instead, the previous administration intruded on the facts and fueled mass chaos and confusion.”
Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teacher union, called the script “a good first step.”
“Schools should be the safest place in any community,” said Pringle in a statement. “Now that we have a clearer orientation from the CDC, state and local decision makers need to be able to look educators, students and parents in the eye and ensure this with complete confidence.”
Still, said Pringle, many schools “attended by black, mixed race, indigenous and poor white students” do not have “the basic protections that the CDC said are universally required.”
“If they are applied universally in all communities and resources are put into practice in an equitable manner for all students, our school buildings will be safe for personal learning,” said Pringle.
The CDC said that schools can be reopened safely, provided certain precautions are taken, raising hopes that students will soon be able to return to classrooms in school districts that have not had face-to-face education for more than a year because of pandemic.
In its 35-page guide, the CDC reiterated the need for masking, hand washing, contact tracking and social distance to prevent the virus from spreading.
He also emphasized that the safest way to open schools is to ensure that there is as little disease as possible in the community and included a color-coded chart to help administrators decide what type of learning is safer based on rates of new cases per 100,000 people and the percentage of positive coronavirus tests.
“The evidence suggests that many K-12 schools that have strictly implemented mitigation strategies have been able to safely open for face-to-face education and remain open,” said the CDC. “Elementary and secondary schools should be the last places to close after all other mitigation measures in the community have been employed, and the first to reopen when they can do so safely.”
He also made it clear that although states should prioritize teachers for vaccination, this is not a prerequisite for reopening.
This has been a critical point in urban and crowded school districts like Chicago, which is the third largest in the country and where many teachers have made it clear that they would not return to the classroom until they received the Covid-19 vaccination.
“I am happy that they are giving priority to teachers, under the previous schedule that was not the case,” said Diana Muhammad, 38, a physical education and dance teacher at the Beasley Academic Center on the south side of the city. if it is not mandatory, at least we are now a priority on the list. “
Vaccination remains a major concern, revealed a recent NEA survey of 3,300 educators. Only one in five received an injection, he found, and 85 percent of respondents said teachers should be prioritized for vaccines. And 70 percent said they would feel safer working personally if they were vaccinated.
President Joe Biden has set a goal of reopening more than 50% of schools in the country by the hundredth day of his presidency. And the latest figures from Burbio, a data service that audits school opening information, suggest that the goal is achievable.
Forty-one percent of elementary and high school students are already back to school, receiving traditional face-to-face classes every day, according to Burbio’s numbers. About 25% are doing a hybrid of classroom and virtual education. And 34% of elementary and high school students are currently receiving “only virtual” education.
Unlike his predecessor, Biden did not pressure reluctant school districts to reopen classrooms. Former President Donald Trump harshly criticized the CDC’s previous guidelines, calling them “impractical” and “expensive” and threatened to cut federal funding for schools that refused to reopen.
It was an empty threat. Trump had no authority to cut funding that lawmakers had already allocated to schools, said the House Appropriations Committee spokesman at the time.
Samee Ali reported from Chicago and Siemaszko from Montclair, New Jersey.