As the debate heats up nationwide over the reopening of schools, Chicago teachers, activists and families rallied outside City Hall Monday to oppose a planned return to classrooms when Chicago Public Schools classes resume next month.
The protests are part of similar demonstrations in several cities across the nation and come just days before CPS parents are being asked to tell the district whether their children will go back to in-person learning or continue trying to learn from home.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot and CPS officials have proposed a return to schools that would put most students in classrooms two days a week and school staff, including teachers, four days a week. They’ve asked families sign up children for in-person or fully remote learning by this Friday.
Andrea Parker, a teacher at Fulton Elementary, says she loves her students, but putting them and teachers in school buildings this fall is dangerous. “Let’s not set students and teachers up for failure.” pic.twitter.com/B8dkP68QZT
— Nader Issa (@NaderDIssa) August 3, 2020
The most vocal leader in the push to keep school buildings closed is the Chicago Teachers Union, which has said it believes in-person instruction is not safe for teachers or students as COVID-19 continues to spread.
The union has gone as far as suggesting a potential repeat of last fall’s strike could be used as a last resort if staff are forced to return to classrooms. Mirroring the lead-up to last year’s walkout, the CTU is renewing its rivalry with Lightfoot by ramping up its public attacks on the mayor, with its harshest criticisms coming Monday.
“It is failed leadership to believe that we can bring hundreds of thousands of people back into school communities and not suffer loss and sickness,” said the union’s vice president, Stacy Davis Gates, an outspoken and frequent critic of Lightfoot.
“Instead of pretending as if COVID-19 is not as dangerous and deadly as it is, we should be figuring out how to educate children virtually,” she said. “We all concede it’s not ideal, so now we need to figure out how to make it work as best as we can.”
Davis Gates said “no” when asked whether there was anything Lightfoot or CPS could do in the next month to get teachers back in school Sept. 8, the start of the next school year.
At a press conference outside union headquarters on the Near West Side, CTU President Jesse Sharkey said Lightfoot “does not have the guts to close the schools,” adding another direct attack on the mayor.
“They’re putting it on us to close the schools,” Sharkey said. “That’s what we feel like is happening.”
Andrea Parker, an English Language Arts teacher at Fulton Elementary, said at the news conference that she loves her student and wants to see them, but she isn’t willing to put herself or the kids at risk. Fulton is in Englewood, which neighbors some of the communities hardest-hit by COVID in the state.
“Sending our students to school in a hybrid model is putting our children and all our staff members in harm’s way. It is very dangerous,” Parker said.
Parker added that she doesn’t believe a return to an unusual school setting will benefit students’ emotional and social health the way some might think.
“I have to tell my students they can’t hug each other,” she said. “They can’t be too close to each other. They can’t share pencils. … It’s not going to be what you think it is.”
CPS has said precautions will be put in place at schools, such as temperature and health checks, social distancing and universal masking. The district is giving every student and staffer three reusable masks and has pledged to provide all schools with cleaning supplies — something CPS failed to do in the spring.
But Davis Gates said she doesn’t believe CPS has done enough — such as hiring nurses for every school, replacing dirty or broken ventilation systems and hiring more teachers — to ensure a safe reopening.
The union vice president said she doesn’t deny the impacts continued remote learning could have on students in special education or those from low-income families who don’t have the same resources outside of school. But those problems existed before, she said, and putting those students back into unhealthy situations isn’t a replacement.
“At what point is Chicago going to lift up the lives of people who live here?” Davis Gates asked. “The worst thing in the world was for our school communities to shut down. We know that there is not a social safety net in a lot of the communities that we work in. We knew that already. … At some point we’ve got to do better than normal.”
Teachers then traveled via a car caravan to a mid-day rally at City Hall, where they demanded more equitable education funding, better health care and affordable housing for the communities of color that make up the majority of students at CPS.
Meanwhile, Latino parents and students in Logan Square gathered earlier in the morning to mourn lives lost to the coronavirus with a public art installation and join the calls for schools to remain closed. The group, led by the Logan Square Neighborhood Association, also traveled by car caravan to meet at City Hall.
A different group led by activist organization Grassroots Collaborative and prominent CTU member Jackson Potter rallied in the morning at the Chicago Board of Trade “to inform residents about where resources to open schools safely can and should come from.” That demonstration also met with the others.
