CHICAGO – Children who have been encouraged by the pandemic at home for months are slowly returning to classrooms, but many teachers say they will not return until they have received the Covid-19 vaccine.
Especially in Chicago, the country’s third largest public school district, where teachers who were to return to classrooms on Wednesday have been working from home again and are threatening to strike again.
‘Community outreach is still so high in Chicago, and so many people are sick and dying. I do not know how to keep myself safe in an old building with so many people, “said Kirstin Roberts, a preschool teacher at the Brentano Academy of Mathematics and Science, on the northwest side of the city. I do not understand why we should risk our lives when we are so close to a vaccine. ”
While researchers from the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recommended reopening schools as soon as possible with masks and other guarantees, the teachers most opposed to the idea were in districts such as Chicago, which had no personality Dennis Roche of Burbio, a data service investigating information about the school’s opening, said.
“It seems like teachers want to facilitate vaccination,” he said. ‘But it did not stir the needle’ in districts where education was mostly virtual.
According to the latest Burbio newsletter, the percentage of kindergarten students up to 12th grade students attending only ‘virtual’ schools has dropped from almost 50 percent to 42 percent.
But as of Wednesday, about a third of all students in the United States have had no personal training since March and have been concentrated in a small group of six states and several large cities, ‘Roche said.
These states are Oregon, California, Virginia, New Mexico, Maryland and Washington, and the major cities include Chicago, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Cleveland and Boston, he said.
In Chicago, there was a week-long impasse between teachers and the school district over the resumption of personal education, which so far has been limited to only a few special education and preschool classes.
The teachers’ union has, with reference to safety, voted against returning to classrooms, although they are threatened with professional discipline and excluded outside the online teaching platforms.
This forced the Chicago Public Schools to move back their planned return date from Monday to Wednesday to allow more time for negotiations, a deadline that is now over.
President Joe Biden said Monday he has sympathy with the Chicago teachers.
“It’s not so much about the idea that teachers are not going to work,” Biden said during a briefing with reporters. “The teachers I know want to work.” They just want to work in a safe environment and … as safe as we can make it rational. And we can do it. ‘
In a study published online Tuesday in the journal JAMA, CDC researchers offered a series of recommendations for reopening classrooms, saying their data suggest schools are not responsible for the same type of Covid-19 outbreaks that occur at old age homes, correctional facilities and “high density works”, such as meat packaging plants.
“There was little evidence that schools contributed significantly to a greater distribution of the community,” they wrote.
But in New Jersey, where Governor Phil Murphy did not prescribe the vaccine for educators, teachers in the affluent suburbs of Montclair and Maplewood want to be vaccinated before resuming their own schooling.
“We are close to February and there are already vaccines available for high-risk individuals, so there is a return to school,” the South Orange and Maplewood Education Association, the local teachers’ union, said in a recent letter. told the school. plate. “But to do so as numbers increase, variety strains spread, and under circumstances that make actual instructions less effective, it is not only deadly, but reckless.”
In Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine said he was accelerating the distribution of vaccines to school staff in hopes of getting all teachers back in the classrooms by March 1.
“Many of her districts will start next week, but we do not have enough vaccine to start all schools on February 1,” he said.
Scott DiMauro, president of the Ohio Education Association, the largest union for teachers in the state, said he was good at getting teachers vaccinated faster, but many will not get their second chance by March 1st.
“While we agree that vaccinating school workers is critical to returning to personal instructions, it was clear that this was immediately unfair and unrealistic,” he told The Columbus Dispatch in an email.
Ali reported from Chicago, Siemaszko of Montclair, New Jersey
