In one corner was Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D). “They abandoned their posts and they abandoned kids and their families,” she said in a blistering critique of teachers who refused to show up for their jobs in person. In the other was the powerful teachers union. “Relentlessly stupid, relentlessly stubborn,” Chicago Teacher Union President Jesse Sharkey fired back at the mayor about her stance on COVID-19 protocols that has forced a closure of the city’s public schools. Caught in the middle — the ones being hurt — are the more than 300,000 students in the nation’s third-largest school district who for more than a week were shut out of school and deprived of any kind of learning. The contentious standoff ended Monday night with a deal to reopen classrooms today.
At issue were concerns about whether it is safe for students, teachers and staff to return to schools for in-person learning as the highly contagious omicron variant drives record infections. After a fall semester in which schools saw relative success in getting students back in the classroom, the surge in covid infections has presented new challenges and complexities.
Some cities — notably New York and D.C. — pushed ahead (to their credit) with in-person learning, implementing tightened safety procedures.
Hand it, though, to Chicago — with its history of toxic labor politics — to come up with the worst of both worlds. After members of the union voted last week not to return to the classroom after winter break, Ms. Lightfoot canceled district-wide instruction, locking teachers out of school computer systems. Fault the union for thinking it always has the upper hand because of its ability to persuade its members to refuse to show up at their jobs. Fault the city for its intransigence to such reasonable demands as requiring diagnostic testing for all students unless their parents opt out. Ms. Lightfoot, who called such screening “morally repugnant,” would have done well to look at how this program worked in D.C. to get students back in school. She ultimately backed down and agreed to ramp up testing.
A lot has changed — and so much for the better — since the early days of the pandemic. Effective vaccines have been developed and are widely available. (More than 90% of Chicago school staff is vaccinated.) School districts (including Chicago) have spent millions of dollars to improve ventilation systems. Omicron, while highly contagious, is not as deadly as previous variants, and the virus rarely causes serious illness or death in children. One of the lessons that should have been learned is that schools can be — when protective measures such as universal masking are in place — one of the safest places for children. It is where they belong.
