The Chicago Teachers Union has reached a preliminary agreement with Mayor Lori Lightfoot to partially reopen the city’s schools for personal classes from this week, the mayor announced Sunday.
If finalized, the deal would stave off a strike that threatened to disrupt student education in the country’s third-largest school system. It will also allow kindergarten students up to eighth grade, plus some high school students with severe disabilities, to return to classrooms, albeit according to a slower schedule than the mayor originally wanted.
Nearly all of the city’s 340,000 public school students have been studying at a distance since March.
Mrs. Lightfoot, a Democrat, acknowledged Sunday that the bitter battle with the union has hit parents particularly hard. But she claims that what the city has achieved is of the utmost importance, calling public education ‘the great equalizer’.
“With the reopening of our school, we have taken an important step forward 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 has seen one of the worst examples of battles across the country that elected officials, who are campaigning to reopen schools, have spoken out against unions who say it is not safe to return to buildings before teachers are vaccinated.
A similar battle is underway in Philadelphia, where the kindergarten, through second-grade teachers, must report to school buildings Monday to prepare for the return of students on Feb. 22. The teachers’ union there told its members to continue working.
In San Francisco, where schools remain closed and the city is seeking an order to force the Board of Education to draw up a reopening plan, the district and the teachers’ union announced a preliminary reopening agreement on Sunday. The agreement requires a further reduction in reports of the new coronavirus in San Francisco – where it is already lower than in many other cities in the country – before students return to classrooms, so the timing of its reopening remains unclear.
Under the Chicago agreement, nursery school students and students with severe disabilities would return to classrooms on Thursday. The students were already at school for two and a half weeks in January before the dispute over Covid-19’s safety measures sent them home again.
Staff working in the nursery through fifth-class classrooms will return on February 22, and students in the grades will return on March 1st. Staff in sixth to eighth grade will return on March 1 and students on March 8. still no plan to bring most high school students back to classrooms.
The agreement still needs to be approved by a group of about 800 elected union leaders known as the House of Representatives; a vote is expected on Monday. Then the agreement will go to a ratification vote on Tuesday by the union’s approximately 25,000 members of the country.
Me. Lightfoot argued that many of the city’s most vulnerable children have struggled with distance education and that the reopening of schools is crucial to enable them to reach their potential. The union opposed the mayor’s inconvenience to teachers, students and their families.
The argument also adopted a racial element, with the union arguing that the mayor, who is black, caters to the small minority of white parents in the district, who prefer to send their children back to school for personal education against higher rates. as the black or Spanish parents of the district. About 60 percent of the black and Hispanic families in the district chose to have their children taught at a distance after the schools reopened, and the union accused the mayor of ignoring the families of the families.
According to the preliminary agreement, the district must interrupt the pupils for two weeks if the rate of positive coronavirus tests increases sharply and consistently over the course of a week and exceeds 10 percent by the seventh day. It states that an individual class would temporarily return to distance education if there was one positive case present while it was contagious, and that an entire school would temporarily return to distance education if it had three positive cases in three days during a 14-day had different classrooms. period.
The city has agreed to speed up teachers and other school workers. This will include the fact that next week we will have to offer 2000 doses to the staff in the classrooms that have to reopen on Thursday, and to employees who live with people who are at high risk for complications from Covid-19.
Under the agreement, teachers who do not personally attend students can teach remotely, and other teachers who have not yet been vaccinated can take unpaid leave for the next term instead of returning in person.
All staff members will be tested for the coronavirus at least every two weeks, and staff members at schools in neighborhoods with the highest dose of virus will be tested weekly. Students at those schools, as well as high school students with severe disabilities, will be tested once a month.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the umbrella association for the residents of Chicago and San Francisco, said Sunday that the agreements in those cities are a major turning point.
‘It sends a strong message that, although there has been tension and that we are in the middle of the pandemic – there is a lot of tension and there is a lot of fear – that when the sides can come together and see solutions and it can follow the road map , can safely reopen our schools. ”