Already one day into returning in person, five staff members at McCutcheon Elementary School in Uptown were forced to go into quarantine after a teacher tested positive for coronavirus. Despite this, Chicago Public Schools officials have opted to keep the school open for in-person learning.
Reports of other students entering the buildings with positive COVID-19 cases are also beginning to surface at other individuals schools.
According to the plan outlined by CPS, both the teachers and students that were in contact with the teacher should be placed in a 2-week quarantine and return to remote learning. This means that it is possible that only after one-day of returning in person, students can already be placed back into remote learning due to concerns of spreading the virus. CPS testing policy of staff members is also inadequate. CPS sent an email to staff noting that only up to 25% of staff will be tested on a monthly basis and that it is completely voluntary.
Other concerns arose over claims made by CPS to have purchased an air purifier for each classroom with most of the air purifiers being too small for the size of the classroom space.
Images from schools also show students who are not six feet apart and students not properly wearing mask even though CPS ensured staff that these protocols would be enforced heavily.
What we are seeing is the first glimpse of a return-to-school plan that is incomplete. Despite concerns brought to CPS over its incomplete return-to-school plan by the majority of the city’s alderman and individual local school councils CPS still went ahead and opened schools in the deadliest wave of the pandemic ignoring the mayor’s extension of the stay-at home order.
Spending the last year refusing to bargain over returning to school or even remote learning with the Chicago Teachers Union, CPS might be forced to do so once Governor Pritzker signs a bill passed by the Illinois Senate. The bill approves the repeal of the section of the 2019 Illinois Educational Labor Relations Act that limits what the CTU is allowed to bargain over including classroom and learning conditions of students. Mayor Lightfoot who claimed to have supported this bill during her campaign for mayor is now rallying against it citing that it might delay her plan to reopen Chicago Public Schools. This is not the first campaign promise that Lightfoot has broken; during her campaign, Lightfoot was a strong advocate for an elected school board, but now has also rallied against the Illinois General Assembly’s latest attempt to create one.
We know that we have to return to in-person learning eventually; but during the deadliest wave of the pandemic, the best thing that can be done is for CPS to work with with CTU and the families of students on a reopening plan that gets kids safely back into schools. This way schools can reopen for summer school and in the fall when the virus is expected to be more manageable with the increase of vaccinations.