Chicago schools expected to announce all-remote learning as teachers union plans steps toward possible strike, sources say

CHICAGO — Chicago Public Schools is expected to announce as soon as Wednesday an all-remote learning plan to start the school year amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, a move that could avert a potential Chicago Teachers Union strike, sources said.

The switch to an all-remote learning plan could come as the CTU plans to convene its House of Delegates next week to consider a process that eventually could lead to a strike if CPS doesn’t agree to start the school year with full remote learning, sources said Tuesday. The union’s governing body includes members representing schools from across the city.

A city source emphasized the decision had nothing to do with a potential teachers strike.

Parents and guardians of the district’s 355,000 students have been eyeballing this Friday as the deadline to inform CPS whether their pupils would attend in-person classes or stay home. CPS educators contacted by the Tribune said they were still waiting for word on the plan Tuesday afternoon.

Educator unions nationwide, including the Illinois Federation of Teachers and American Federation of Teachers, have said they’d support local unions if insufficient COVID-19 precautions on the part of school districts lead to “health and safety strikes.” The CTU’s bylaws require a full membership vote to authorize a strike after the matter comes before the House of Delegates, the union’s governing body, whose members represent schools throughout the city.

Earlier Tuesday, however, Chicago’s health commissioner said she wants children learning in classrooms this fall “if the outbreak is broadly in control.”

Dr. Allison Arwady warned that lots of COVID-19 spread in Chicago is taking place right now within households, going so far as to suggest people living with at-risk family members consider social distancing and wearing masks within their homes.

But speaking days before the deadline that CPS set for parents to decide whether to let their children attend classes in person two days per week starting in September, she also said if the city’s pandemic numbers look good, she feels the schools can handle in-person learning safely.

“Where the child is at school wearing a mask with the social distancing, with the appropriate procedures in place, I honestly do not think the risk of spread is significant,” Arwady said at her weekly news conference about the city’s travel list. “I wouldn’t be promoting this if I thought it was.”

Arwady didn’t talk specifics, but she and Mayor Lori Lightfoot have pointed to an 8% positivity rate or a seven-day average of 400 new cases per day in Chicago as benchmarks that could indicate the virus is too out of control to risk in-person learning.

Chicago’s positivity rate is currently 4.8%, and the daily case count is at 273 and rising, Arwady said Tuesday.

Lightfoot’s point person on the pandemic made her comments a day after members of the CTU, parents and students descended on City Hall to protest the mayor’s plan to potentially reopen schools in the fall with a “hybrid model” where children attend classes two days a week and learn from home the other three.

CTU President Jesse Sharkey on Monday said it’s not appropriate to have in-person learning “in an environment with raging contagion,” and that the union won’t stand for it.

“The mayor does not have the guts to close the schools,” Sharkey said outside CTU headquarters. “They’re putting it on us to close the schools. That’s what we feel like is happening.”

On Tuesday, Sharkey tweeted: “A win for teachers, students and parents. It’s sad that we have to strike or threaten to strike to be heard, but when we fight we win!”

The advantages to children who are around one another in school are significant, Arwady said Tuesday.

“I’m a pediatrician, and I feel pretty strongly that there are benefits for in-person education, especially for younger children who don’t learn well from screens, and all of the social and emotional benefits, and all of the other things we’ve talked about,” Arwady said. “But it all comes back to what that local data looks like.”

Critics say doing that would put teachers, students and their families at unnecessary risk.

CPS had told parents to choose by this Friday whether they want their children to learn in school using the hybrid model this fall, or stay at home.

Though some celebrated the decision to move to remote learning, others criticized CPS for not announcing it sooner.

“Had CPS made this decision sooner, we would have had more time to plan for robust remote learning and the resources needed for our city’s kids to be able to learn,” Alderman Andre Vasquez tweeted.

School districts across the Chicago area and the U.S. are scrambling to put guidelines in place to prepare for the school year to start in a few weeks even though virus cases are far from contained in many areas.

Several suburban school districts recently shelved in-person or hybrid plans for the fall, opting instead for all-remote starts to the new year on the grounds it’s too risky to bring students and teachers together.

CPS officials have stressed that they will only reopen schools if it’s safe but also that schools likely will need to reopen at some point before any COVID-19 vaccine is fully rolled out. News of a potential teachers strike, which would follow last fall’s walkout, broke Tuesday afternoon — on Lightfoot’s birthday.

As Chicago’s positivity rate for coronavirus cases continues to rise, Arwady said, “I can’t say the risk is zero, of course.”

“And again, the more our numbers are going up in Chicago, the more concern I have about this. Because as our cases increase, the risk of people having COVID, especially asymptomatic COVID, does go up,” she said.

———

©2020 Chicago Tribune

Visit the Chicago Tribune at www.chicagotribune.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.