Despite Chicago Public Schools extending a “cooling off” period through Thursday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot started the day casting blame on the Chicago Teachers Union for the lack of an agreement over reopening schools.
“We are out of runway,” the mayor said at a morning news conference, insisting a deal was needed Thursday. ” … Time is running out.”
Nearly 12 hours later, no deal had yet surfaced, despite the mayor’s insistence and tactics, from social media quips to joint, one-sentence statements with CPS CEO Janice Jackson reminding local media that they were still waiting on the CTU to respond to their latest proposals.
Thursday evening, the two leaders released another terse statement: “Late this afternoon, we received a counter proposal from CTU leadership and we are working on a response.” They gave no further details or any indication of further progress.
Not knowing whether or when any educator lockouts might be coming, union members were planning to continue their remote work action on Friday, which is a prescheduled nonattendance day for students.
During a 6 p.m. meeting with members, CTU President Jesse Sharkey said the two sides still needed agreements on a phase-in plan, along with other items noted in a bargaining update Wednesday. The two sides have reached some important tentative agreements, but do not yet have something they feel comfortable bringing back to members, according to sources present.
Though Sharkey seemed confident they’d achieve an agreement, he acknowledged that could still require a strike, sources said.
During the morning news conference, Lightfoot said she was losing patience with the union.
“My patience with delays from the CTU leadership is over,” Lightfoot said.
Noting it’s the final day of the quarter, Jackson said she’s continued to hear from parents who have to support their high-needs children all day or who are essential workers and need child care, along with “countless Black and Latinx families who are falling behind.”
“This is personal to me,” said Jackson, whose daughter was supposed to return to elementary school on Monday along with 60,000 other students.
Families cannot stay in limbo waiting for news about reopening, she said: “Our parents want to know what’s going on, and to the mayor’s point, we need to get a deal done today.”
A statement provided by the teachers union attributes their tentative agreements to action and support from members, parents and school communities, pointing out the district’s initial position that it didn’t have to negotiate a reopening plan.
“Our goal is, and has always been, a mutually agreed upon safe reopening plan for our schools. These decisions, however, cannot be made unilaterally in a vacuum,” the union stated. “They require buy-in from all stakeholders in our school communities, and we will continue to lift democracy in soliciting feedback from educators and families in bargaining for the safe return that our students deserve.”
Nearly two dozen Illinois state lawmakers signed a letter Thursday urging the mayor to further compromise, in a similar vein to a letter last month from a supermajority of aldermen. The state legislators listed five primary requests: reach an agreement with the CTU, agree not to lock anyone out of remote work platforms before reaching the agreement, accelerate a program to vaccinate staff, include parents and community partners on school health and safety committees, and improve remote learning, which still accounts for the majority of the hybrid model.
“It is our belief that there should be no in-person return to learning prior to the second semester’s start on February 8 and that a return to in-person learning be phased in,” they wrote.
Lightfoot said her administration expects teachers back in school “as soon as possible” but did not give a date. Because Friday is a day off for students, the earliest they could be back is Monday.
Ratcheting up pressure on the union with sports analogies, Lightfoot said “the ball is in the CTU’s court” and that its leaders need to get serious and meet her administration “at the finish line.”
Despite a series of productive exchanges on Monday and Tuesday “that should have absolutely” led to a deal by Wednesday, Lightfoot said the union took “a series of steps backward that were simply not productive.”
Just before she spoke, the teachers union released an open letter to parents, saying the district could not resume in-person instruction without movement on central issues.
Based on a bargaining update provided to union delegates Wednesday evening, CTU is demanding accommodations be granted for all employees who either have medical risks, are primary caregivers or live with someone who does. The district’s best offer so far was accommodations for all staff who are in a high-risk medical category and for 20% of those who have a household member in that category. CPS would also require staff members with accommodations to work in person after receiving their first vaccine dose, and these employees would be prioritized among the 1,500 weekly doses the city has earmarked for the district.
Lightfoot declined to explain the rationale behind returns after one dose, saying she was not going to bargain at a news conference.
On Wednesday, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said educator vaccination “is not a prerequisite for safe reopening of schools.”
While the accommodations issue remains a sticking point, bargaining documents indicate the CTU has moved off its initial position of allowing all educators to get vaccines before returning and is amenable to a plan that would ensure at least 1,500 of its members receive vaccines each week.
As of late Wednesday, the district’s proposal on reopening metrics was to close schools if its voluntary staff surveillance testing program had a 3% positivity rate. The CTU’s counteroffer was to follow CDC criteria for “lower risk of transmission in schools,” a positivity rate below 5% and fewer than 20 new cases per 100,000 people every two weeks.
At the mayor’s news conference, Dr. Allison Arwady, Chicago’s health commissioner, noted the city’s positivity rate has fallen to 5.4% and said the city’s got roughly 539 new COVID-19 cases each day.
“This is the best shape our city has been in from a COVID perspective since the beginning of October,” Arwady said.
She underscored again the body of scientific evidence suggesting that, with proper virus mitigation, schools have not been shown to be a major center of COVID-19 spread when community transmission is under control.
Individual cases in schools have occurred, but “the question is whether we see the spread of COVID in school settings,” Arwady said, referencing the study last fall on open Chicago Archdiocese schools that showed little spread and mostly isolated cases.
“We have not seen anything unexpected,” she said.
CPS has reported more than 200 cases tied to schools for the month of January: 37 adults the week ending Jan. 9, when prekindergarten and special education staff were called back; 47 adults and seven children the week of Jan. 16, when more than 3,000 students returned; 40 adults and five children the week of Jan. 23, when in-person classes were canceled midway through the week in light of the CTU’s remote work action; and 62 adults and three children last week, after a small percentage of elementary school staff returned despite the collective action.
For the quarter, at least 10 schools have reported five or more cases. The most common case count reported was one.
Of 7,744 rapid tests administered through a voluntary staff surveillance program, 12 have been presumed positive, according to CPS.
The union’s open letter said the mayor and CPS “are still threatening to lock out teachers and shut students out of all learning if we don’t capitulate on critical outstanding safety issues,” adding that thousands of CTU members are also CPS parents.
“We love your children,” the union wrote. “We desperately want to be back in classrooms with them, but we are not willing to accept the inevitable illness and death a reckless reopening will inflict on our city.”
But Lightfoot and Jackson insisted that schools are safe, and said the city’s had three weeks of limited in-person learning that’s shown that.
“As the expression goes, the proof is in the pudding,” Lightfoot said. “CPS had three weeks of successful implementation of these mitigation plans in our schools. That was until the CTU blew up that success and created chaos that we are now enduring.”
In addition to ventilation measures already in place, the district has ordered devices for each school that can be used to check air quality, Jackson said.
“At this point finding a public health expert who opposes in-person learning would be like finding a scientist that doesn’t believe in climate change,” Jackson said.
Earlier Thursday, at a news conference hosted by the teachers union, some parents said they’ve felt their voices aren’t being heard.
Parents Wednesday night waited until 9:30 p.m. to learn whether in-person school would resume Thursday, as children went to bed uncertain whether they were expected to wake up less than 10 hours later and go to school for the first time since March.
“We only have a few more months to go and they’re making all this chaos with the kids going back, not going back, are the teachers going to be back in school tomorrow? They’re making it more stressful than it should be because right now, it’s working,” said Dulce Jimenez, a parent with a student at Sadlowski Elementary School, in the far southern East Side neighborhood.
But the parents who spoke Thursday morning weren’t directly affected by the last-minute decision. They instead said they would keep their children in remote learning even when schools do reopen. They were more concerned that dozens of CPS teachers still remain locked out of their Google classrooms in what they consider a punitive decision, even after Lightfoot said no additional teachers would be locked out this week.
Students affected by the lockouts includes Ana Avila’s son, a 5-year-old kindergarten student in a special education program at Corkery Elementary in Little Village whose teacher was locked out two weeks ago, leaving students in his Google classroom without a teacher since then. Students have been working with two special education classroom assistants instead.
“I don’t know if CPS knows, understands that the people they are hurting the most are our children,” Avila said through a Spanish language interpreter Thursday. “We have tried many things to get our teacher reinstated, and CPS is not listening to us. Although the (classroom assistants) are doing the best they can, they’re not a teacher, and I think two weeks without a teacher will set (the students) back. For CPS telling us they’re doing this reopening for our students, is not true. CPS is not only punishing teachers, but it is also punishing our students.”
Many other CPS families support giving parents the choice of in-person learning for their children, and many have complained that CTU’s voice drowns out all others. About 19% of students eligible to return in the first wave Jan. 11 ended up doing so before CPS reverted to remote learning in light of the conflict with CTU.
When Jackson was later asked about teachers who remain locked out because they have refused to report to schools, she lamented the impact that has had on affected students and families but spoke of personal responsibility on the part of the staff members.
“This is an organization, we do have rules and employees are expected to do what’s expected of them,” she said.
The mayor also later questioned how the CTU has “time to orchestrate press conferences and letters” but, she said, doesn’t have “a focus on getting a deal done?”
Lightfoot and Jackson also have faced criticism for national media appearances on networks including MSNBC and CNN, while families and local journalists haven’t been given much opportunity to ask questions directly.
On Thursday, the first media availability related to school reopening since an abbreviated news conference on Sunday, Lightfoot admonished a veteran WBEZ education reporter for pressing questions. “You’re violating the rules here, it’s your first time,” Lightfoot said, waving her finger in circles. City Hall only recently started allowing education reporters to participate in a pool rotation for news conferences related to CPS, following a similar move by the district.
Check back for updates.
