Chicago Schools to Reopen After Deal With Teachers Union on Coronavirus Safeguards

Teachers in Chicago are back in classrooms Tuesday and students are set to join them on Wednesday after city officials and union leaders resolved a week-long dispute over how to operate in-person learning safely in the country’s third-largest school district as coronavirus infections spike across the city.

The tentative deal, announced just before midnight on Monday, appeased neither party fully but paused a long and bitter feud between Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the Chicago Teachers Union – one that drew national attention to the challenges big-city school districts still face in operating schools for in-person learning and one that threatened to become a larger narrative on the state of public education under a pro-union White House.

“I’m glad that we’re hopefully putting this behind us and looking forward, but there does come a point where enough is enough – three work stoppages in three years?” Lightfoot said Monday evening. “Of course people are frustrated. Why wouldn’t they be? I’m hopeful that this is the end, at least for this school year.”

Jesse Sharkey, president of the union, lamented a deal that fell short of what his 25,000 members wanted to secure but one they felt enormous pressure to accept due the central office docking educators’ pay and preventing them from reaching their students by locking them out of their teaching accounts.

“We wound up with something at the end of the day that was as much as we could get right now, and it was going to be enough,” Sharkey said.

In the end, the mayor and Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez agreed to specific metrics that would flip individual schools to remote learning, but stopped short of agreeing to district-wide return to virtual instruction.

Under the proposed agreement, schools can pivot to remote learning if 40% of students are quarantined, if 30% of staff members are absent due to COVID-19 or if the use of substitute teachers doesn’t reduce the absence rate below 25%. The union also secured an agreement to test 10% of students and staff but was not successful in switching the randomized testing program to something students opt out of rather than opt into. Instead, Chicago Public School leaders agreed to entice more students to join the program with stipends for their families.

The deal, which still needs to be blessed by the union’s membership in a vote Tuesday before becoming final, was brokered as COVID-19 cases tick up in Chicago, which went from having a 4% positivity rate on Dec. 1 to a 21% positivity rate by Jan. 1 – a spike driven almost exclusively by the highly transmissible omicron variant.

While schools remain one of the safest places for students during the pandemic, the futility of the variant has left many large urban districts short-staffed as educators and administrators quarantine and isolate due to infections and exposures. According to the school tracking site Burbio, school closures reached their highest total of the academic year last week. On Dec. 31, the site tracked 1,591 schools that announced closures or virtual instruction for the first week in January – last week – but by the end of the week it had identified 5,409.

And while children remain at lower risk of developing severe symptoms or needing to be admitted to the hospital, the increase in pediatric hospitalizations due to omicron has public health officials concerned, causing some parents to keep their children home even when their schools are open. Last Friday, for example, just 44.5% of students showed up for school in New York City, even though schools were open.

With Republicans beginning to seize on the narrative that the labor dispute in Chicago represented the status quo of America’s education system under a pro-union president whose wife is a member of the National Education Association, the White House was forced to address the situation.

On Monday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki rebuffed those claims and told reporters that the president wanted schools to open in Chicago, underscoring the significant mental health implications students incurred during virtual learning.

“We have been very clear publicly and privately that we want to see schools open,” Psaki said, adding that the White House had been in touch regularly with Lightfoot, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and the Chicago Teachers Union leadership.

“The mental health impacts on kids of not having schools open is very harsh and hard, and he does not want to see schools closed across the country,” she said. “There is no secret about that. That continues to be what he states.”

Read: White House to Provide 10 Million Tests Per Month to Keep Schools Open

“The president’s been very clear, as we have been clear, we are on the side of schools being open. That is why he advocated for funding in the American Rescue Plan. And we will continue to convey that clearly because he believes the mental health impact on kids could be dire, and it is imperative that kids are in the classroom,” she said.