CPS hiring 2,000 new workers — no Chicago residency required — to help reopen schools

CPS
is hiring 2,000 workers to help with school reopenings next month.
| Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

Half of the jobs, which pay $15 an hour, include supervising
students in classrooms where teachers are remote, monitoring social
distancing and masking and conducting health screenings.

Chicago Public Schools is looking to hire 2,000 new employees to
take on pandemic-related duties and fill in gaps in staffing once
schools return in-person in January, a plan that’s drawing a
rebuke from the teachers union and that signifies one of the major
challenges of reopening the third-largest district in the nation
during a public health emergency.

One of the primary responsibilities for half of the new
positions will be student supervision, according to a job posting.
That includes supervising “students who are learning in person if
[the] classroom teacher is teaching remotely,” the posting says,
raising questions about what in-person instruction will look like
for students who return to classrooms and signaling that the
district intends to forge ahead with reopening despite a
potentially massive number of staff requests for medical leave.

“Staffing is a concern, I don’t want to pretend like it’s
not,” CPS human resources chief Matt Lyons said in an interview.
“But I’m confident about where we are right now and that
we’ll be able to provide a good learning experience for those who
come in person.”

The district is requiring all preschool and special education
cluster program staffers to return Jan. 4, and all elementary
school employees to go back Jan. 25, each group a week before their
students. CPS has not said how many employees have applied for
medical leave or accommodations ahead of the district’s planned
return. Those decisions were due to the district by last Monday,
and some principals have said as many as a quarter to half of their
staff have asked to stay home because of health and safety concerns
as COVID-19 infections reaches peak levels in Chicago.

Asked if the spike in hiring is in response to excessive
requests for leave, Lyons said “it’s really in anticipation of
teachers and other staff being out, it’s not a response to what
we’re seeing.”

Staffing has “been one of the major challenges from other
school districts as they’ve come back, and so we’ve learned
from those,” he said, describing the hiring as a strategic plan
rather than a frantic scramble.

Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Stacy Davis Gates said the
part-time job posting was the first the union heard teachers might
teach remotely to students in a classroom, a proposition she called
“slightly less terrible than forcing teachers to engage in
synchronous learning from unsafe buildings.” She said in a
statement, however, that “hiring people into a position that
barely pays minimum wage, with zero health care benefits in the
middle of a pandemic, seems particularly cynical.”

“CPS can try to exploit low-wage temporary workers to fill in
for staff who are not willing to sacrifice their lives for their
livelihoods, when they must instead come to the table and bargain
collaboratively to land what we need to return to our school
buildings and our students safely — enforceable safety standards
and real equity for Black and Brown school communities starved of
equity for years before this pandemic,” Davis Gates said.

Some part-time, non-union jobs A
screenshot from the job posting for the part-time jobs.

Half of the new jobs will be so-called
“cadre substitute” teachers — and become members of the
Chicago Teachers Union — who are licensed educators and will work
in schools to beef up the ranks with potentially thousands of the
district’s 22,000 teachers taking medical leave or needing other
accommodations. Those positions are temporary but receive
benefits.

The other
1,000 new positions will be part-time, non-union workers who
will make $15 per hour, won’t be given health care and will have
a variety of responsibilities at schools that, along with student
supervision, could include monitoring social distancing and
masking, shuttling supplies and equipment around the school and
conducting health screenings at the entrance. About 3,200 of the
district’s existing 38,500 employees are not in a union.

Although overseeing classrooms while a teacher worked remotely
was the first job duty listed in the online posting, it would only
happen when “absolutely necessary, as a last resort,” Lyons
said.

Lyons said the part-time miscellaneous positions already exist
at some schools, and that CPS is “not hiring non-union employees
to do union jobs. We know better, that’s not what we’re
attempting to do.”

In the past, CPS has asked special education classroom
assistants to supervise students when a teacher called in sick at
the last minute or was otherwise unavailable. The district’s
agreement with SEIU Local 73 last fall limited supervision by SECAs
so they could instead focus on their primary responsibilities.

About two to four new positions are slated to go to every school
that’s set to reopen in the new year. It’s unclear how quickly
the school system can hire that many workers — CPS has had
difficulty finding substitute teachers and hired only a fraction of
the custodians it announced would be brought in months ago.

Unlike usual city employee jobs, none of the new positions
require Chicago residency.

‘An operational necessity’

CPS’ hybrid learning plan includes 15-student pods to minimize
contact with large groups and to make contact tracing easier. But
to fill their responsibilities, the new workers will certainly have
to come in contact with multiple student pods a day — as will
teachers who move from classroom to classroom to teach different
groups.

Asked if the additional adults coming in contact with several
groups posed a new health and safety risk, Lyons said “this is
one of those minimal risks that, it doesn’t present any
additional danger in any way. It’s more an operational
necessity.”

“All of the efforts we’re taking are layered mitigation
risks,” Lyons said. “There’s a chance that if anyone who goes
from classroom to classroom is COVID-positive, it’s possible they
have close contact across pods and it would force certain different
pods to shut down temporarily. But the likelihood versus the value
to the school operations of that being the specific person is
fairly low.”

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