[Over 10,000 CTU members have pledged their opposition to the
reopening plan put forward by the mayor and Chicago Public Schools
(CPS), citing serious concerns over safety and transparency.]
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CHICAGO TEACHERS ARE CONSIDERING A STRIKE AMID PANDEMIC SURGE  
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Jeff Schuhrke
January 5, 2021
Working In These Times
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_ Over 10,000 CTU members have pledged their opposition to the
reopening plan put forward by the mayor and Chicago Public Schools
(CPS), citing serious concerns over safety and transparency. _

,

 

As the coronavirus pandemic enters
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deadliest phase yet, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and its allies
are resisting Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s plan to reopen school buildings
and resume in-person learning this month.

Over 10,000 CTU members have pledged their opposition to the
reopening plan put forward by the mayor and Chicago Public Schools
(CPS), citing serious concerns over safety and transparency. 

In-person learning is set to resume for pre‑K students on
January 11, and for elementary school students on February 1. Mayor
Lightfoot and CPS have not yet indicated when they plan to reopen
high schools.

“Many of our members are not feeling safe at all, they’re feeling
more anxious and scared than ever,” said CTU President Jesse
Sharkey. He added that union members will hold meetings in the coming
days and weeks and may consider holding a strike authorization vote.

Lightfoot and CPS claim their determination to reopen schools at this
time is a matter of equity for students of color who they say are
falling behind under remote learning. But only
[[link removed]] 31 percent
of Latino families and 33.9 percent of Black families feel
comfortable sending their kids back to in-person learning. These are
the same communities that have been hardest hit
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Covid-19. Across the country, other teachers’ unions are
similarly protesting
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reopening plans that they deem unsafe. 

“The biggest obstacle to reopening schools is the management of CPS,
because they’ve failed to reach the standards set by teachers and
principals for our support of a reopening plan,” said Troy
LaRaviere, president of the Chicago Principals & Administrators
Association, which also opposes the rush to reopen. ​“Contrary to
the words of our mayor and CEO, this reopening plan does not seek to
address inequity, it is promoting inequity.”

With its members handpicked by the mayor, the Chicago Board of
Education is the only unelected school board in Illinois.
Meanwhile, 36 out of 50 elected alderpeople on the City Council
have signed onto a letter
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their concerns with the school reopening plan. Similarly, multiple
local school councils — elected bodies of parents, students and
teachers — have issued
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[[link removed]] objecting
to the plan.

“We believe the plan CPS has put forward is irresponsible. We
don’t think we are ready to send children back to the classroom, and
neither should we send teachers and staff,” said Alderwoman Rossana
Rodriguez-Sanchez. ​“It seems like every failure of this system
ends up being the responsibility of teachers and staff to fix and we
are always offering them in sacrifice when we can’t make the
systems work.”

CTU Vice President Stacy Davis Gates concurs. ​“You have
a situation right now where principals, paraprofessionals,
clinicians, classroom teachers, elected officials, students and their
families are begging, demanding, asking for safety in the middle of
a pandemic,” she said. ​“And then the question comes to the
Chicago Teachers Union, ​‘Are you all going on strike?’
I actually think that’s the wrong question. The right question has
to be, ​‘Why aren’t they — the mayor and her team at
CPS — listening to everyone else?’”

On Monday, about 7,000 pre‑K and special education teachers and
staff were expected to return to school buildings, with their students
set to return next week. Although CPS is threatening to discipline
educators who refuse to return in-person, about 40 percent
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not reenter school buildings on Monday. 

At Brentano Math and Science Academy in Logan Square, teachers and
staff who had been told to report inside the building on Monday
instead set up tables and laptops in the school’s outdoor courtyard,
where they held remote learning sessions all day in
below-freezing temperatures.

“One of our biggest responsibilities is to protect, to guide and to
advocate for our students at all times. This means we need to work to
ensure their safety, the quality of their education and to set an
example by standing up for our own health and safety too,” said
Annie Kellogg, a special education preschool teacher at Brentano.

“We work hard to attain our students’ trust. This can take weeks
and months,” Claire Colt, a social worker at Brentano,
explained. ​“Now because of the anxiety and uncertainty caused by
CPS reopening schools to in-person instruction at the height of the
pandemic, there is a chance these relationships may be
disrupted…This means more losses for our students, precisely at
a time when they need as much stability as possible.”

According
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a CTU survey, 69 percent of educators who chose to return to school
buildings on Monday reported
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conditions, lack of PPE and inadequate air filters for classrooms.
Lightfoot and CPS CEO Janice K. Jackson posted photos on Twitter of
their visit to two elementary schools — but reporters were not
invited
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these events, nor were they on the mayor’s public schedule. 

The CTU is demanding
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public health criteria for reopening schools, specifically that
in-person learning only resume when Chicago’s test positivity rate
is below 3 percent. The city’s current
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rate is over 10 percent and rising. 

“They didn’t go by any metrics or any data, they went by
a date,” Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa said of CPS’s reopening
plan. ​“And they picked a date that comes right after a period
of time when people were gathering indoors and spreading coronavirus
to each other during Christmas and New Year’s.”

A major point of contention between the union and CPS has been the
school district’s insistence that it can unilaterally impose
a reopening plan without first reaching a negotiated agreement with
the CTU. Last month, the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board
denied the union’s motion
[[link removed]] for
an injunction on the current reopening plan, but an administrative
judge will hear the case
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the end of this month.

“It’s not going to work if the district simply continues dictating
to us and doesn’t sit at the table and listen to the people who are
most on the ground, who know most about what the specific conditions
are like in buildings,” Sharkey explained.

“We need more than what we are receiving in this moment,” Davis
Gates said. ​“And it should not take a fight that shuts
everything down to get those things.”

JEFF SCHUHRKE has been a Working In These Times contributor since
2013. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of Illinois at
Chicago and a Master’s in Labor Studies from UMass Amherst. Follow
him on Twitter: @JeffSchuhrke

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