Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez said Monday he’s “not going to give up” trying to reach an agreement with the Chicago Teachers Union that averts a districtwide move to remote learning amid a spike in city COVID-19 cases.
“I visited six schools today, and our network chiefs were visiting schools across the city. And one of the things that we saw was just significant differences across schools,” Martinez told the Tribune before describing some schools that recorded low staff and student attendance and other schools with opposite experiences. “When I saw that today, it just, for me, confirmed that we need to have a solution that’s at the school level, where we can be nimble, where we can respond to what’s happening.”
CTU’s governing body — the 600-member House of Delegates — is expected to meet Tuesday. All of the union’s 25,000 members are slated to receive an electronic ballot asking if they support working remotely instead of in person starting Wednesday.
CPS students returned to school buildings Monday. The end to the two-week winter break came as Chicago reported an average of nearly 4,000 daily coronavirus cases, a 42% increase from the prior week. About 600 Chicago kids are testing positive per day, with five daily hospitalizations, according to city data. Some Chicago aldermen and CTU leaders raised concerns about CPS’ reopening plans during this surge.
“I am so pissed off that we have to continuously fight for the basic necessities, the basic mitigations,” CTU Vice President Stacy Davis Gates said Monday at a South Side news conference outside Park Manor Elementary School, where some teachers said they planned to work from home because of safety concerns.
CPS responded that it is “deeply concerned” that any “refusal to work” by CTU “could place the health and safety of members of our community, particularly our students, at increased risk.”
Martinez characterized the conversations with CTU as active. The union submitted a proposal last week calling for the district to go remote for two weeks while more protocols are put in place. Short of that, the union asked CPS to have students and staff provide a negative test result in order to return to buildings Monday. CTU also wants CPS to set guidelines for when an individual school and the entire district would switch to remote learning and to distribute KF94, KN95 or N95 masks to all staff and students, among other demands.
CPS said Monday it has 200,000 KN95 masks for teachers and staff. Martinez said he believes CTU and the district can come to a “sensible agreement” on a school-based metric for going virtual.
“And it will be factors like, how many of our staff have COVID? How many of them are in quarantine? How many of our children have COVID? How many of them are in quarantine? Do they vary across different classrooms?” Martinez said. “I think those kind of metrics we can come up with, and we can be very nimble based on what’s happening with omicron, so we can do the right things.”
For months, CPS and CTU have been negotiating over a safety agreement for this school year. An agreement reached in early 2021 after tense negotiations led to students returning to campuses in waves during the last school year.
In a Monday interview on CNBC, Mayor Lori Lightfoot downplayed the “same old saber-rattling by teachers union leadership” and said remote learning has had a “devastating effect” on children and their families. She reiterated that Chicago schools will remain open.
“We need to keep our kids in school, which is what we’re going to do in Chicago,” she said.
Later, Lightfoot released a statement saying “schools are the safest place for students to be.”
In a Sunday email, Martinez sought to reassure parents that health and safety procedures such as indoor masking, in-school weekly testing and vaccination offerings will continue into 2022. Some students in the meantime started the new year in quarantine or isolation. The district policies are:
Any student, regardless of vaccination status, who is exhibiting symptoms of COVID-19 is directed to stay home, get tested and isolate for 10 days.
Unvaccinated students who traveled to any U.S. state or territory except for Guam and Montana should get tested and stay home for seven days after return, regardless of test status.
Unvaccinated students who came in close contact with an infected person are directed to stay home and quarantine for 10 days from their last exposure regardless of their test result.
Vaccinated students who are close contacts of a person who tested positive can attend school as long as they are not experiencing any coronaviruslike symptoms.
Only students who are directed to quarantine by CPS or the Chicago Department of Public Health will have access to real-time online remote instruction.
Students do not need test results to attend school.
“I just don’t believe that a districtwide action is going to be practical. It’s going to punish. We have over 100,000 students that are vaccinated. So many of our children — the vast majority — want to be in school. They want to be in person, and for us, we know that’s the best place for them to learn,” Martinez said.
“Parents remember what it was like when the district went remote the last time. I think the fear that exists right now is if the whole district has to take a district action, it’s very difficult to come back from that. And we know the mental and the social-emotional impact that it has on our children, not to mention the academic challenges that our children will have.”
About 330,000 students are enrolled in CPS, the nation’s third-largest school district. Some 51% of district students 12 to 17 years old and nearly 12% of students 5 to 11 are fully vaccinated, a CPS spokesperson said. CPS says about 91% of its staff is fully vaccinated.
CPS said it handed out 150,000 at-home test kits for use over winter break to students at 300-plus schools in communities with low vaccination rates. More than 1,900 students tested positive through the at-home program, according to district data.
The date to return the kits was Dec. 28, but CPS extended that deadline to Thursday after photos surfaced of overflowing shipping boxes at drop-off sites. CPS said in a statement Monday that it learned over the weekend that more than half of the 40,000 kits that were returned “could not be validated.”
The district said it was looking into what went wrong and is “focused on increasing on-site testing opportunities for the impacted students and schools this week as part of our ongoing weekly testing.”
Martinez had said on Thursday that there were no issues with packages left near full drop-off boxes. He said Monday that it was a disappointment that so few test kits were used and a frustration that more than half of the results were invalid.
“Trying to do an initiative like this without having the schools open is just incredibly difficult,” Martinez said. “It was issues between the vendor, with the shipping. Regardless of whatever the issues are, we need to learn from them. And we still have over 115,000 tests out there in the community that we still want to be able to use at some point.”
Ald. Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez, 33rd, asked Martinez in an email Sunday about testing information.
“I also want to know what the plan is for testing, how many in-home COVID tests did CPS get results for and what are the goals and plan to vaccinate as many students as CPS possibly can. I am very concerned about the lack of information around plans for all of these things,” she wrote.
“We are receiving messages from concerned families in our wards and I want to be able to give them information.”
Martinez said testing took place Monday at more than 125 of the district’s 500-plus schools. He said he wants to partner with CTU to expand testing. The district’s weekly in-school testing program that’s mandatory for unvaccinated staff members and voluntary for students got off to a slow start.
Martinez also said a new pilot program that would allow unvaccinated students to test their way out of quarantine has been paused “because we’ve seen such a surge in cases, but we plan to resume it as soon as we start seeing stabilization in cases.”
Ald. Maria Hadden, 49th, tweeted Sunday that City Council members continue to press Martinez, Lightfoot and city public health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady for solutions and “better decisions.”
“@ChiPubSchools hasn’t done what’s necessary for the return and it’s not okay for us to pretend like they have,” Hadden wrote. “We’re in the highest COVID spike yet. The testing and contact tracing systems for CPS were inadequate before the surge and staffing levels are critically low.”
Tribune’s Gregory Pratt contributed.
