CHICAGO – A new Center for Disease Control and Prevention roadmap for the reopening of schools in the country during the Covid-19 pandemic received a good mark from powerful unions on Friday.
“Today, the CDC has overcome fears of the pandemic with facts and evidence,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement. “For the first time since the beginning of this pandemic, we have a rigorous roadmap, based on science, that our members can use to fight for a safe reopening.”
Weingarten calls the CDC’s proposals’ an informed, tangible plan ” that it has the potential to help school communities across the country stay safe by defining mitigation and housing measures and other tools needed by educators and children, so that classrooms can be again. living places of learning and involvement. ”
Weingarten’s organization is one of many working groups that have been very critical of the Trump administration’s chaotic pandemic response.
“Of course, this set of guarantees should have been done ten months ago,” Weingarten said, adding that the AFT released recommendations in April, similar to those in the CDC plan. “Instead, the previous government interfered with the facts and caused mass chaos and confusion.”
Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers’ union, called the roadmap a good first step. ‘
“Schools should be the safest place in any community,” Pringle said in a statement. “Now that we have clearer CDC leadership, state and local decision-makers need to be able to face educators, students and parents and ensure this with full confidence.”
Pringle said many schools “attended by black, brown, indigenous and poor white students” do not have the basic protection generally required by the CDC. “
“If applied universally in every community and the resources are fair to all students, our school buildings will be safe to learn in person,” Pringle said.
The CDC said schools could reopen safely as long as certain precautions existed, raising hopes that students would soon be able to return to classrooms in school districts that have not had personal training for more than a year due to a pandemic.
In its 35-page guide, the CDC reiterates the need for masking, hand washing, contact detection and social distance to prevent virus spread.
It also emphasizes that the safest way to open schools is to make sure there is as little disease as possible in a community, and it includes a color code to help administrators decide which type of learning is safest. , based on the number of new cases. per 100,000 people and the percentage of positive coronavirus tests.
“Evidence suggests that many K-12 schools that have strictly implemented mitigation strategies have been able to safely open up for personal instruction and remain open,” the CDC said. “K-12 schools should be the last institutions to close after all other mitigation measures in the community have been put in place, and the first to reopen if they can do so safely.”
It also made clear that although states should prioritize teachers for vaccination, it is not a prerequisite for reopening.
It was a bottleneck in busy, urban school districts like Chicago, which is the country’s third largest and where many teachers made it clear that they would not return to the classroom until they received the vaccination against Covid-19.
“I’m glad they prefer teachers, according to the previous timeline that was not the case,” said Diana Muhammad, 38, a physical education and dance teacher at the Beasley Academic Center on the city’s South Side. if it is not necessary, we are at least now a priority on the list. ‘
Vaccinations remain a major concern, a recent NEA poll found among 3,300 educators. Only one in five got a shot, found, and 85 percent of respondents said teachers should give preference to vaccinations. And 70 percent said they would feel safer working personally if they were vaccinated.
President Joe Biden has set himself the goal of reopening more than 50 percent of the country’s schools by the 100th day of his presidency. And the most recent figures from Burbio, a data service that investigates information about opening schools, suggest that the goal can be achieved.
Forty-one percent of elementary and high school students are already back in school, receiving traditional personal instruction daily, according to Burbio’s figures. About 25 percent do a hybrid of personal and virtual training. And 34 percent of K-12 students are currently receiving ‘virtual only’ training.
Unlike its predecessor, Biden did not put unwilling school districts under pressure to reopen classrooms. Former President Donald Trump has sharply criticized earlier CDC guidelines, calling them ‘impractical’ and ‘expensive’ and threatening to cut off federal funding to schools that did not want to reopen.
It was an empty threat. Trump had no power to cut off money that lawmakers have already allocated to schools, the House Compensation Committee spokesman said at the time.
Samee Ali reported from Chicago and Siemaszko from Montclair, New Jersey.