CHICAGO – Children who have been at home for months due to the pandemic are slowly returning to classrooms, but many teachers say they will not return until they receive the Covid-19 vaccine.
Especially in Chicago, the nation’s third largest public school district, where teachers who were due to return to classrooms on Wednesday have worked from home again and are once again threatening to strike.
“The spread of the community is still very high in Chicago, and many people are sick and dying. I don’t know how to stay safe in an old building with so many people, “said Kirstin Roberts, a preschool teacher at Brentano Math and Science Academy, on the northwest side of the city.” I don’t understand why we have to risk our lives when we are so close to a vaccine. “
Although researchers at the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that schools be reopened as soon as possible with the use of masks and other safeguards in place, the most resistant teachers to the idea were in districts like Chicago, which had little or no face-to-face education since March, said Dennis Roche de Burbio, a data service that audits school opening information.
“Vaccinating teachers, it seems, would make things easier,” he said. “But that hasn’t changed the needle” in districts where education has been mostly virtual.
The percentage of students from kindergarten through 12th grade who attend “virtual only” schools has decreased in the last week from almost 50% to 42%, according to Burbio’s latest newsletter.
But as of Wednesday, about a third of all students in the United States had had no face-to-face education since March and they were concentrated in “a small group of six states and several large cities,” said Roche.
Those states are Oregon, California, Virginia, New Mexico, Maryland and Washington, and major cities include Chicago, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Cleveland and Boston, he said.
In Chicago, there was a one-week standoff between teachers and the school district about resuming face-to-face education, which has so far been limited to just a few special and pre-school education classes.
Citing security issues, the teachers’ union on Sunday voted against returning to classrooms, despite being threatened with professional discipline and having access to online education platforms blocked.
This forced the Chicago Public Schools to postpone the planned return date from Monday to Wednesday to allow more time for negotiations, a deadline that has passed.
President Joe Biden said on Monday that he sympathized with Chicago teachers.
“It’s not so much about the idea that teachers are not going to work,” Biden said during a news conference with reporters. “The teachers I know want to work.” They just want to work in a safe environment and … as safe as we can rationally. And we can do that. “
In a study published online Tuesday in the journal JAMA, CDC researchers offered a series of recommendations for reopening classrooms and said their data suggests that schools are not responsible for the same type of Covid-19 outbreaks. which have been reported in nursing homes, correctional centers and “high density workplaces” as refrigerators.
“There is little evidence that schools have contributed significantly to increasing transmission in the community,” they wrote.
But in New Jersey, where Governor Phil Murphy did not prioritize the vaccine for educators, teachers in the affluent suburbs of Montclair and Maplewood want to be vaccinated before resuming face-to-face studies.
“We are approaching February and vaccines are now available to high-risk individuals, so a return to school is on the horizon,” said the South Orange and Maplewood Education Association, which is the local teachers’ union, in a recent letter to edge school. “But doing so as the numbers increase, variant tensions are spreading and, under conditions that make real instruction less effective, it is not just stupid, but reckless.”
In Ohio, Governor Mike DeWine said he was accelerating the distribution of vaccines to school officials with the hope of bringing all teachers back to class by March 1.
“Many of your districts will start next week, but we don’t have enough vaccine to start all schools on February 1,” he said.
Scott DiMauro, president of the Ohio Education Association, the state’s largest teacher union, said it is okay to vaccinate teachers more quickly, but many will not have their second injection until March 1.
“While we agree that vaccinating school staff is extremely necessary to allow a return to instruction in person, it was clear from the beginning that the date was unfair and unreal,” he said in an email to The Columbus Dispatch.
Ali reported from Chicago, Siemaszko de Montclair, New Jersey
