CHICAGO – Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot sought to blame the Chicago Teachers Union for the lack of an agreement to reopen Chicago Public Schools and said “time is running out.”
“We are deeply disappointed to announce that we still have not reached a deal,” the mayor said at a Thursday news conference. “The ball is in CTU’s court.”
She asserted that the city waited for hours for an updated CTU proposal and “we are still waiting this morning, to be clear, not patiently. ... My patience with delays from the CTU leadership is over.”
She also said: “We are out of runway. ... Time is running out.”
Noting it’s the final day of the quarter, CPS CEO Janice Jackson said she’s continued to hear from parents who have to support their high-needs children all day or who are essential workers and need childcare, along with “countless Black and Latinx families who are falling behind.”
“This is personal to me,” said Jackson, whose daughter was supposed to return to elementary school on Monday along with 60,000 other students.
“At this point finding a public health expert who opposes in person learning would be like finding a scientist that doesn’t believe in climate change,” Jackson said.
Families cannot stay in limbo waiting for news about reopening, she said.
“Our parents want to know what’s going on and to the mayor’s point, we need to get a deal done today.”
Lightfoot said her administration expects teachers back in school “as soon as possible” but did not give a date. Because Friday is a day off for students, the earliest they would be back is Monday.
CTU leadership needs to get serious and meet her administration “at the finish line,” Lightfoot said, repeating that “we need a deal today.”
Lightfoot reiterated that schools are safe, and said the city’s had three weeks of limited in-person learning that’s shown that.
“As the expression goes, the proof is in the pudding,” Lightfoot said. “CPS had three weeks of successful implementation” until the CTU “blew up that success” and “created chaos.”
Ratcheting up pressure on the union, Lightfoot said, “The ball is in the CTU’s court.”
Despite a series of productive exchanges on Monday and Tuesday “that should have absolutely” led to a deal by yesterday, Lightfoot said the union took “a series of steps backward that were simply not productive.”
Just before she spoke, the teachers union released an open letter, saying in part: “We cannot return to in-person instruction until we have made more progress with the district on CDC-based health metrics, allowing educators with medically vulnerable family members to continue to teach remotely, and addressing real equity needs for the vast majority of our students — particularly Black and Latinx students who continue to learn remotely.”
The union also said the mayor and CPS “are still threatening to lock out teachers and shut students out of all learning if we don’t capitulate on critical outstanding safety issues. We sincerely hope that doesn’t happen. Thousands of our members are also CPS parents. We love your children. We desperately want to be back in classrooms with them, but we are not willing to accept the inevitable illness and death a reckless reopening will inflict on our city.”
But at the mayor’s news conference, Dr. Allison Arwady, Chicago’s health commissioner, noted the city’s positivity rate has fallen to 5.4 percent and said the city’s got roughly 539 new COVID-19 cases each day.
“This is the best shape our city has been in from a COVID perspective since the beginning of October,” Arwady said.
She underscored again the body of scientific evidence, including a study she co-authored, suggesting that, with proper virus mitigation, schools have not been shown to be a major center of COVID-19 spread.
Earlier Thursday, at a news conference hosted by the teachers union, some parents said they’ve felt their voices aren’t being heard.
Parents Wednesday night were left waiting until 9:30 p.m. to learn whether in-person school would resume Thursday, which is representative of the district’s pattern of offering late-night announcements regarding school the next day.
“We only have a few more months to go and they’re making all this chaos with the kids going back, not going back, are the teachers going to be back in school tomorrow? They’re making it more stressful than it should be because right now, it’s working,” said Dulce Jimenez, a parent with a student at Sadlowski Elementary School, 3930 E. 105th St.
But the parents who spoke Thursday morning weren’t directly affected by the last-minute decision. They instead said they would keep their children in remote learning even when schools do reopen. They were more concerned that dozens of CPS teachers still remain locked out of their Google classrooms in what they consider a punitive decision, even after Mayor Lori Lightfoot said no additional teachers would be locked out this week.
Students affected by the lockouts includes Ana Avila’s son, a 5-year-old kindergarten student in a special education program at Corkery Elementary, 2510 S. Kildare Ave., whose teacher was locked out two weeks ago, leaving students in his Google classroom without a teacher since then. Students have been working with two special education classroom assistants instead.
“I don’t know if CPS knows, understands that the people they are hurting the most are our children,” Avila said through a Spanish language interpreter Thursday. “We have tried many things to get our teacher reinstated and CPS is not listening to us. Although the (classroom assistants) are doing the best they can, they’re not a teacher and I think 2 weeks without a teacher will set (the students) back. For CPS telling us they’re doing this reopening for our students, is not true. CPS is not only punishing teachers but it is also punishing our students.”
The mayor later question how the CTU has “time to orchestrate press conferences and letters” but, she said, doesn’t have “a focus on getting a deal done?”
Lightfoot and Jackson also have faced criticism for not providing in-person updates over the past several days, with one CPS administrator telling the Tribune: “Parents want answers.” Others have admonished the leaders for only offering updates via national media appearances on networks including MSNBC and CNN, while families and local journalists haven’t been given much opportunity to ask questions directly.
Lightfoot previously insisted schools would reopen last Monday, when more than 60,000 elementary students were signed up to return, or else the teachers would be locked out. She dropped the threat and allowed remote learning to continue after it was clear the union would discard her deadline — but teachers from the first reopening wave who had not reported in person were, and remain, locked out.
Thursday was the next targeted return date but it, too, was postponed after most of those students would have been in bed Wednesday night, uncertain whether they were expected to wake up less than 10 hours later and attend school in person for the first time since March closures during the coronavirus pandemic.
Many other CPS families are supportive of giving parents the choice of in-person learning for their children, and many have complained that that CTU’s voice drowns out all others.
