Maggie Owens’ 4-year-old daughter knocks 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 Chicago schoolchildren to return to her classroom last month. But then, two and a half weeks after the phase’s reopening of the district, a clash between the city and the teachers’ union forced everyone to go to distance learning again, and me. Owens told Louise she would have to learn on the computer again.
“She just lost it. She started crying, ‘said Mrs. Owens recalled, adding: ‘She got a routine, she was happy, and then we snatched it from her. ‘
After an interruption of nearly two weeks of personal tutoring, the Chicago Public Schools and its teachers’ union reached a preliminary agreement to prevent a strike, after educators refused to work in person during the pandemic without further safety concessions.
When completed, the district said the agreement, announced Sunday, would include about 3,000 students in the kindergarten and some special education classrooms – such as Ms. Owens’ daughter – will be able to return on Thursday. The district is the third largest in the country, with 340,000 public school students.
Me. Owens, who lives on the far northwest side of the city, said she was glad an agreement had been reached. But she was frustrated with the district as well as the union because she let the conflict go into a crisis.
“I feel like it’s lost in it, there are real people and real children who are harmed by this,” she said. “And I feel like my daughter is one of them.”
The Chicago Teachers Union’s House of Delegates, a leadership body of about 800 members, voted Monday night to send the agreement with the city to the full 25,000 membership for ratification. The ranking will vote electronically, with results expected by midnight on Tuesday.
The agreement makes it possible for all students in the nursery school up to eighth grade, plus a number of high school students with disabilities, to return to schools in the coming weeks.
As part of the deal, the city has pledged to offer 2,000 doses of coronavirus vaccine this week to staff members in the classrooms that would reopen on Thursday and to any other employees living with people at high risk for the disease. virus het. It will then provide 1500 doses per week to school staff in the weeks that follow.
Teachers who do not attend students who attend personal lessons can continue to teach at a distance, and unvaccinated teachers can take unpaid leave for the next term instead of teaching in person. The agreement also set thresholds for what would prevent the district, as well as individual schools or classrooms, from returning temporarily to distance education.
A similar battle took place on Monday in Philadelphia, where teachers conducted distance learning in the cold outside dozens of school buildings to protest what the union called an unsafe reopening plan.
Philadelphia will bring the kindergarten back to schools through the second-grade students on Feb. 22, and teachers in the grades would originally report to buildings Monday. But the local union instructed them to stay home and set up a showdown.
Mayor Jim Kenney said at the outset that teachers do not have to work in person while a mediator has reviewed 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 a limbo after her school reopened briefly last month and then reopened. closed. She was getting ready for school excited one morning when his wife had to announce the news to her.
“She started crying and purring, why can’t she go to school,” he said. Preston said. “And we had to talk to her and try to explain to her that adults are fighting over whether or not she should go back to school.”
He said he had not yet told Lear that she would most likely be able to return to school on Thursday in case the union voted against the agreement and the district became chaotic again.
“For me and my wife, stability is one of the most important things for us and our children,” he said. “I do not want to do this to our 4-year-old until I have a high degree of certainty that she will in fact return.”
Ellen Almer Durston contribution made.