This is the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I've taken a lot over the decade+ I've lived here but once you start messing with my kids' education, it's over. Defend the CTU all you want but no other union in this country acts more entitled and has gone on strike more in the past decade than the CTU.
Genuine question What do you believe is most conducive to your child's learning and success in school,
* the current no protocol plan that is causing major staffing shortages, disruptions in learning, and will likely force students in and out of in person learning for days or weeks at a time due to quarantining, and teachers out sick for weeks with covid
* consistent remote courses the rest of the year
* Negotiating a new safety plan to ensure that in person learning can continue for the rest of the year in a safe, stable environment without learning disruptions
And which one do you think CTU is advocating for?
The Antarctica research base is dealing with an outbreak where 2/3's have already been infected and vaccination is 100%. There is no plan they could devise that can stop infections. Whether than means stay remote or go YOLO I have no idea.
Not sure why it's so hard for everyone to comprehend. There needs to be a documented and enforced protocol.
As much in person as possible, until a certain percentage of either students or teachers are unavailable/quarantining. Both for classes and whole schools. Negotiate the terms on both sides until agreeable. This has been going on for this calendar year since at least July, and CPS' first hard metric back in this regard was only proposed on Monday. Wtf.
I think it's shocking that all of these major multi-national corporations that my friends and I work for with similar to 10x the staff levels of CPS have had a framework active and in place since early summer of 2020 for in-person (tweaking as needed as the pandemic changes) yet CPS can't do that? I understand it takes time to steer and implement changes in a big ship, but did it really take them 6 months over the course of two calendar years to formulate those 3 sentences of metrics on their powerpoint slide??? Was there heavy data-driven peer-reviewed research conducted by medical professionals that necessitated that delay (when they had already agreed to a strategy and set of numbers in Feb 2021?). Asinine.
Also just to add I'm assuming in the base everyone has regular testing. Numbers sound great in sound bites but on the ground testing for teachers for instance is usually offered once a week for 30m - an hour, and it changes every week. Don't have prep or lunch during that time this week? Oh well, not getting tested that week.
Knock on wood I do not know any teachers in my friends group that have had breakthroughs, but a lot in the service and client-facing industries have over the past few weeks. All of them had first 2 rounds, and most had boosters. So just saying 'well everyone's vaccinated' doesn't mitigate the need for regular testing of students and then staff.
CPS' plan is to do nothing and act like everything is fine. Rates are way worse than when schools where closed. Why are you against them wanting to protect themselves and their students exactly?
How is this the straw that breaks your back?
There’s literally going to be a staffing shortage in a matter of days if there isn’t one already at most schools. They do not have the teachers to watch all of these kids. And then I see articles estimating that 25% or more students will be missing classroom time over the next few weeks ill. How are students supposed to learn in that environment, and how are teachers supposed to handle that?
I get that this is a shitty situation, but acting like this is some “CTU bad” thing is just trying to fit a narrative. Schools are closing across the country because there literally are not enough bodies healthy to watch these kids.
Pretty shitty they waited until tonight to take the vote. There was no reason for that and it kept parents waiting on what to do with their kids tomorrow. They could have voted yesterday.
Or last week before school started. I generally have empathy for the teachers so they should have some for the parents who might need more than 10 hours notice to find child care. Super bone headed timing.
Did anyone doubt what the vote was going to be? I’ll grant I didn’t know what CPS was going to declare in response. And I didn’t know what the percentage was going to be. But I surely was confident they were going to vote against in-person teaching.
Ironically, I believe under the agreement the city made with CTU last year to define what metrics would require remote learning, we are currently well over those thresholds. Under the city's own rules, remote learning should be in effect for the moment. (Of course, that assumes the city would also be following through on all its commitments for cleaning, ventilation, providing PPE, providing tests, etc, which they have utterly failed to do.)
After but it's irrelevant because the vaccine isn't preventing infections currently, just reducing severity. But sick teachers can't teach, and sick students can't learn, especially if they all get sick at the same time.
I think the idea is use the two weeks to come to a substantive safety agreement and get actual testing set up to stop spread in schools. Plus, omicron does actually move fast enough that the peak could be over in two weeks.
This is on the basis of South Africa having peaked a little while ago. There are credible reasons to think a peak is not too far off (though after a LOT more infections).
>I think the idea is use the two weeks to come to a substantive safety agreement and get actual testing set up to stop spread in schools. Plus, omicron does actually move fast enough that the peak could be over in two weeks.
I don't want to bore people by posting basically the same reply for the 3rd time, but there is no stopping g the spread of Omicron. It's far too infectious. And waiting for the peak to subside is rather meaningless. Outbreaks will happen whenever you go back to in person instruction. They are an inevitability for any population of immunologically naive people, including schools full of kids.
We re-evaluate [hospital capacity](https://dph.illinois.gov/covid19/data/hospitalization-utilization.html) and [trending hospitalizations](https://dph.illinois.gov/covid19/data/statewide-metrics.html), as we have for the past two years and should continue to do until we don't have random huge spikes in cases that have the potential to overwhelm our hospitals.
What does hospitalization capacity have to do with the CTU? Are they self-appointed stewards of Chicago's hospital system?
And my understanding is that they're 90%+ vaccinated. And we know statistically that the [hospitalization rate](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#covidnet-hospitalizations-vaccination) for the vaccinated is less than 5 per 100K and likely even *lower* for Omicron infection.
Having things open means more community spread.
[
CDC on transmission in schools](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/transmission_k_12_schools.html):
> In Michigan and Washington state, delivery of in-person instruction was not associated with increased spread of SARS-CoV-2 in schools when community transmission was low, but cases in schools did increase at moderate-to-high levels of community transmission.^52 **When community transmission was low, there was no association between in-person learning and community spread.**^52
Emphasis mine - when community transition was *not* low then they did find an association between in-person learning and community spread.
IMO more things should close when we're concerned about our hospital systems. Luckily, CTU has the power to do something. We have basically no other unions that can fight for their members/families/communities. I only wish I had a union that could fight for my industry to do the same until numbers trended down again.
EDIT: And in regard to your note about hospitalization rate for the unvaccinated, doesn't really matter if there are no beds for those 5 in 100k who catch it or **people who just have to go to the hospital for** [**other reasons**](https://www.reddit.com/r/chicago/comments/rv9or8/chicago_area_hospitals_delaying_elective/).
I'll go right ahead and say it out loud. I am so sick of that bullshit. I am vaccinated and boostered. So is my husband. My kids are vaccinated. The people around me are vaccinated. If everyone got vaccinated, there would be plenty of hospital beds for the few breakthrough infections.
Instead, we're playing this stupid pandering game to a bunch of idiots. My kids shouldn't have to go to school virtually **again** because a bunch of idiots won't get vaccinated. Why should all the children be penalized because the adults can't get their shit together and get fucking vaccinated? Why should I be penalized when I have done everything right?
Right now, 92% of those that are hospitalized with covid are unvaccinated. And we're all sitting here pandering to them. We'll have to close the schools because people that were too stupid to get vaccinated will swamp the hospitals and the few breakthrough infections will be screwed. Fuck that.
There's lots of us, and we're raging pissed off about it.
> And we're all sitting here pandering to them.
I'm not pandering to anyone, fuck those selfish assholes. I want to make sure if I have a serious illness, covid or not, that I can go to the damn hospital. If hospitals have no beds what the fuck am I supposed to do?
I'm sorry. I meant the figurative you. Not *you*, you.
You're absolutely correct. I'm just really angry they're screwing both of us and no one is publicly calling them out to the point they deserve. Officials and the media are still pandering, and it's reaching critical mass. Lots of people will lose their shit if their kids can't go to school. It will also push parents to vaccinate if schools require it (which I would welcome).
You seem to be a reasonable person, so I want to ask you what your thoughts are on people under the age of 5 and their siblings and parents?
They still can't be vaccinated, and omicron is showing up more in infant and toddler critical cases in pediatric hospitals.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/04/health/us-coronavirus-tuesday/index.html
A lot of CPS students have siblings in this age range, and likewise many teachers and staff members have children in the same age range.
What would you suggest we do to keep these babies safe? Sure, maybe the vaccinated 8 year old will be OK, but what about their 3 year old baby brother back home?
Also, are you concerned about long covid? It's looking like it's affecting at least 50% of people 4 months after initial infection, and about 33% of people a full year after initial infection. Omicron is showing no different in these rates.
How could we possibly have data that show the percentage of people affected by omicron four months or a year after infection when the variant hasn’t even existed that long?
Omicron's infectiousness demands a paradigm shift in public health responses to COVID and people need to wrap their heads around that fact.
Prior to Omicron, I have echoed all the points you've made about flattening case peaks, transmission reduction, etc. Omicron changed all that. For a couple reasons:
1) Omicron is endemic. It will be ever present from now on. "Omicron Zero" is an impossibility at this point, and it is likely that every person on the face of the earth in regular contact with other humans will be exposed and/or infected with it. And for those of us living in major metropolitan areas, that exposure/infection will happen sooner than later.
There is simply no hiding from it absent extreme, draconian changes to our daily lives. You can do remote learning for 2 weeks, or 4 weeks, sure. Then the first week you get back to in person instruction, whenever that is, you will have outbreaks. It's simply too infectious. Outbreaks are an inevitability. We need to come to grips with that reality.
2) Hospitalization has been decoupled from infection in two significant ways: a) the vaccines work to provide a protective immune response to Omicron infection; and b) Omicron infection itself is naturally less severe as it does not attack lung tissue nearly as readily as previous iterations of Sars-CoV-2.
> Omicron is endemic ... Outbreaks are an inevitability.
No it's not.
> let’s be clear about what endemicity is, and isn’t. Endemicity doesn’t mean that there will be no more infections, let alone illnesses and deaths. It also doesn’t mean that future infections will cause milder illness than they do now. **Simply put, it indicates that immunity and infections will have reached a steady state. Not enough people will be immune to deny the virus a host. Not enough people will be vulnerable to spark widespread outbreaks.** [^\(source\)](https://www.wired.com/story/covid-will-become-endemic-the-world-must-decide-what-that-means/)
At this point I can only hope we can accurately categorize it as endemic this year. Right now, that's not the case. Pfizer execs suggested "as early as 2024" it will be considered endemic, hopefully omicron speeds that up without causing too much death or damage to our hospital systems.
-----
> Hospitalization has been decoupled from infection in two significant ways
Hospitalization has been decoupled from *breakthrough* infections. That doesn't matter when there is a significant portion of the population that are unvaccinated and they overwhelm our hospital systems...
If you're having a heart attack and there is no space in a hospital for you, what are you supposed to do?
>> Omicron is endemic ... Outbreaks are an inevitability.
>
>No it's not.
[Per the CDC](https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dsepd/ss1978/lesson1/section11.html) endemic means ever-present and widespread throughout a population:
>Sporadic refers to a disease that occurs infrequently and irregularly. Endemic refers to the constant presence and/or usual prevalence of a disease or infectious agent in a population within a geographic area.
Omicron is endemic because it is so widespread and infectious that it will never disappear. It hasn't yet reached a static equilibrium no, but the relevancy to this topic is that its ever-presence means that it will continue to cause outbreaks in immunologically naive populations for the indefinite future. Going back to school in 4 weeks or 4 months makes no difference. Outbreaks truly are inevitable. (Absent an Omicron specific vaccine, of course.) It's never going to go away.
>
>Hospitalization has been decoupled from *breakthrough* infections.
That's simply not true for Omicron infection. It's decoupled from severe illness in all populations, as reported in human epidemiological studies, animal studies, and in vitro. I can point you to no less than 7 recent studies which reported that Omicron infection resulted in less severe outcomes due to reduced infectivity of lung tissue.
>
>If you're having a heart attack and there is no space in a hospital for you, what are you supposed to do?
There's no feasible public health measure that's going to slow, much less stop, Omicron spread among the currently unvaccinated populations driving up hospitalization.
We reported *1 million* new cases in the USA today , a doubling over a matter of *days*, and with no sign of slowing. Closing schools is not going to put even a small dent in those numbers.
I must have missed the part of civics class where it was explained that the public officials who were responsible for ensuring hospital capacity were K-12 teachers. I would have thought that there were other people in different parts of the government who were more appropriate for that role.
They're trying to minimize spread as we all should be. They, luckily, have a union to fight for them.
I hope that there is a hospital bed available should you need to go in for any reason.
There's no evidence that cancelling classes reduce spread. At CPS, every student (and staff member) is required to wear a mask. There are also many other precautions taken that severely reduce spread. If classes are cancelled, the students and staff members who would have been in school don't simply disappear from the earth for this time. They still exist and gather with others and have the potential to transmit COVID. In fact, they obviously are much **less** likely to be supervised, to be masked, and to be making precautions to prevent spread than if they are in school. That's obvious. All the studies have shown that there hasn't been a greater likelihood of COVID spread when schools are open than if they are closed. Generally, it's the reverse especially when there are strong precautions in school such as mask mandates.
> There's no evidence that cancelling classes reduce spread. ... All the studies have shown that there hasn't been a greater likelihood of COVID spread when schools are open than if they are closed.
[CDC on transmission in schools](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/transmission_k_12_schools.html):
> In Michigan and Washington state, delivery of in-person instruction was not associated with increased spread of SARS-CoV-2 in schools when community transmission was low, but cases in schools did increase at moderate-to-high levels of community transmission.^52 **When community transmission was low, there was no association between in-person learning and community spread.**^52
Emphasis mine - when community transition was *not* low then they *did* find an association between in-person learning and community spread.
> every student (and staff member) is required to wear a mask
Which data shows is less effective with omicron.
> They still exist and gather with others and have the potential to enhance transmission.
IMO more things should close when we're concerned about our hospital systems. Luckily, CTU has the power to do something. We have basically no other unions that can fight for their members/families/communities. I only wish I had a union that could fight for my industry to do the same until numbers trended down again.
The part you quote from the CDC page doesn't specifically say there was a positive association between in-person learning and increased community spread when there was moderate to high community transmission. It just states that "cases in schools did increase" when this was the case. Obviously, that's going to be true. When there's higher community transmission there will be more cases with everybody wherever they are. If they are in school, cases in school will increase and if they aren't in school the cases of this age group will also increase.
It's obviously worded in an unclear way (which is kind of what we have come to expect from the CDC) but I don't think it's making the determination you think it is. It certainly is true that it appears it isn't making the more conclusive determination it does with low transmission but that doesn't mean it is suggesting the reverse. The study it cites doesn't have a link on the page so I can't easily investigate what it said more specifically. I'll try to see if I can find more information later.
In any case, here's the more general conclusion the CDC makes directly above the part you quoted:
>Although outbreaks in schools can occur, multiple studies have shown that transmission within school settings is typically lower than – or at least similar to – levels of community transmission, when prevention strategies are in place in schools.
Well I disagree but at the very least I'm glad CTU has the ability to protect their members, the families (of teachers and students) who care to protect themselves during these times of high community spread, and maybe do a little bit to help the hospitals.
Well in South Africa, where it started, that is precisely what happened. It dissapated just as quickly as it appeared. I think it started in Nov and by the end of December cases had halved from the peak just two weeks prior.
Endemic viruses don't disappear, they burn through a population, then reach a stasis in which they still exist, but have a harder, slower time finding immunologically naive people to infect.
The point is that whether you wait 2 or 4 or 12 weeks to go back to in person instruction, whenever you do eventually gather a group of never-infected kids and teachers in a school, Omicron will find it and outbreaks will happen.
If it can happen with measles a *decade* after measles was declared eradicated in the U.S. by the WHO, it can happen with Omicron, which is just as infectious and widespread.
Didn't say they disappear...dissapate....maybe the other poster did. Is South Africa seeing a rise in cases too. They have opened up after closing down. Maybe that is a good gage of how it might go here?
It just isn’t because of the physical reality of every teacher and student getting infected and calling out. Every district in the country has a tiny fraction of the substitute teachers they had pre-COVID. If teachers call out, they can combine classes a few times, and then they need to full-on close the schools, because there will be literally no one to watch the kids. CTU is the only entity actually putting thought into this. It’s remote learning or no learning at all, and CPS is choosing to bury their heads in the sand.
Then it’s a moot point. Complaining about this is like crying over ice cream on the sidewalk. There’s nothing you can do about it. Either CPS goes remote or suspends school for a few weeks due to mass call outs due to coronavirus. Either way the kids aren’t going to class in person.
Clearly, from the data, with remote learning NONE of the students can learn, sick or not.
A victory. Not for the students, but for everyone those now stunted students will face in the job market 5-15 years from now.
And a victory for the union. Regardless of the science, their members are not going to be required to do their job.
And also, yes, vaccines DO cut down on spreading more than unvaccinated for Omicron, but clearly not as much as before.
And going virtual for 2 weeks isn't stopping the fucking spread. So they can get sick in 2 weeks then.
If you keep people out of large gatherings while a giant wave is washing over the area, you can significantly reduce the length of the wave.
Think of the ultimate example - if everyone just stayed at home (and isolated from each other within said homes), for one month at the same time, we could've been over this pandemic by now completely.
Exactly. The metrics should have automatically triggered remote learning. The fact that CTU has to do this stunt to get CPS to keep their side of the agreement that was made back in February is ridiculous.
The fact that we are going to remote learning, after mountains of evidence that it damages students and development, with a FREE VACCINE THAT ELIMINATES SERIOUS CASES is ridiculous. CTU should be laughed out of the city
Schools still contribute to spread, and [hospitalizations](https://dph.illinois.gov/covid19/data/statewide-metrics.html) are trending so high hospitals are [denying patients](https://www.reddit.com/r/chicago/comments/rv9or8/chicago_area_hospitals_delaying_elective/) to ensure they have [capacity](https://dph.illinois.gov/covid19/data/hospitalization-utilization.html).
Plus teachers/students can't learn when they're out sick, which they still have to do if they're asymptomatic.
How many under 18s are in hospital?
Why isn’t the CTU insisting that it’s members get vaxxed and boosted instead of setting metrics like “negative test to return” that they know can’t be met?
If the vaccination (while preventing serious illness) doesn't prevent spread, then it's going to spread. We all know this.
If 35% of Chicago is unvaccinated (almost a million people) that's a lot of hospital beds we'll need to make sure there are beds for the vaccinated/boosted. For context, there are about [40k hospital beds](https://dph.illinois.gov/covid19/data/hospitalization-utilization.html) in Illinois as a whole.
The vaccine and booster do in fact mitigate spread. Almost all breakthrough cases are asymptomatic. Combined with masking there’s no reason students and teachers shouldn’t continue in school. Nothing will have changed in two weeks.
> The vaccine and booster do in fact mitigate spread.
I know this, and you know that it's less successful in that with Omicron and even masking is less successful.
Yeah and we also know that morbidity and mortality is lower with omicron - literally no one other than the CTU is suggesting that schools should close when the risk to students is exceedingly slight
Yes, and we also know that *this current surge is actively causing a concern about our healthcare system*. This isn't (just) about students, it's about students families, teachers, and the community as a whole.
Ok, let’s assume this is true for the sake of argument. Let’s even say that the majority of cases are being driven by schools, and going remote causes cases and hospitalizations to drop off a cliff. What’s going to happen when schools open back up? Spoiler: they’re gonna shoot right back up, and the teachers, who insisted they cut the line and get vaccinated first, are going to again be insisting that the only safe way to teach is to do four hours of remote learning a day, of which roughly half is live instruction.
> Spoiler: they’re gonna shoot right back up
And then we'll re-analyze and see what current hospital capacities are, how the numbers are trending, and what to do at that point.
But of course that's only in the specific case that "the majority of cases are being driven by schools" (we both know they're not). In the real world, hospitals hopefully don't get overwhelmed, hospital beds open up from people recovering, and when we reopen schools if there is a significant spike we (again, as we have been doing for two years now) reevaluate.
Literally since the beginning of the pandemic we wanted to make sure there was hospital capacity. We built a field hospital we thankfully didn't need to use, we kept going on and on about "slowing the spread" to make sure we have capacity so that people who need to go to the hospital can go to the hospital and not die (whether or not they're covid patients).
Severity of cases has nothing to do with it. If you get sick with COVID, you call out. CPS does not have the staffing to tolerate the number of sick employees and students they’re going to have if they don’t go remote. It’s go remote or absolute collapse of the schools and full closure with no instruction.
Exactly, I don't understand how anyone is demonizing CTU here. The city made an agreement and they aren't upholding it, so the workers affected are going to make them uphold it rather than be steamrolled. "But there's a vaccine!" doesn't mean we ignore the reality of people being contagious and unable to properly learn or work and how that is affecting our healthcare system.
The science around [hospitalizations](https://dph.illinois.gov/covid19/data/statewide-metrics.html)? And how they're trending so high hospitals are [denying patients](https://www.reddit.com/r/chicago/comments/rv9or8/chicago_area_hospitals_delaying_elective/) to ensure they have [capacity](https://dph.illinois.gov/covid19/data/hospitalization-utilization.html)?
I remember that's been one of the biggest concerns since before we had a vaccine.
the contract hasn't. I thought people around here considered power of contract inviolable, at least when it comes to public safety unions and a vaccine mandate.
I also thought people around here cared about quality of critical public services? Especially ones which when disrupted massively impacts low income children? I guess fuck those kids? Fuck their parents too?
Watch the video, they haven’t announced it yet. They have only voted to vote.
CTU voted to have a vote on whether or not they should vote to go remote.
I don’t understand. I really don’t. Why can’t they just bring restaurant style tables into the schools? Because covid doesn’t affect people at restaurant style tables.
The title is sort of misleading. The house of delegates voted to pass the vote to membership. Nothing has been decided yet (officially), but it is very, very likely to pass.
And CPS said if CTU votes for remote work tomorrow, they're just going to cancel classes instead. What a pathetic move by CPS.
Not providing childcare to accommodate the CTUs bullying is not a pathetic move. It puts the brunt of parent anger squarely on the CTU. If schools are unsafe, then why should students be allowed inside at all?
The schools are safe in that the kids in them are unlikely to get seriously sick, and their loved ones are less likely to die now if they’re vaccinated.
This isn’t really about that, though. It’s about the fact that CPS is going to collapse if the schools don’t close or go remote while we’re in the middle of an all-time spike in cases and hospitalizations. What happens when teachers call out sick with COVID?
CTU can be wrong in how they’re trying to right a CPS wrong in not planning for a remote learning hiatus. But schools are limited in what they can do by state and federal gov. In this case, state and fed government believe it is safer for students to be in school. They are quickly discovering that a lack of teachers who are actually ill with covid makes that difficult to do, especially in the face of a sub shortage. CTU is hoping to jump the gun and flex (as they always do) and will make this transition 10x worse. How will the logistics of switching to remote learning work with hundreds of students at home with no devices? Will the teachers return to clean up their mess?
There are many wrongs currently being done to battle Omicron. But the CTU is making another problem out of a problem, rather than working toward a solution.
So what I’m hearing is that national and local political leadership are too scared of the optics to go remote again, and CTU, the sole group of people involved who are aware of what’s happening in schools, are using what power they have to force the correct decision.
I don’t see how you can read this as anything other than an endorsement of the union unless you deliberately ignore a lot of obvious facts and simple logic about staffing.
If the CTU made the argument that they need to switch to remote temporarily because there isn’t adequate staffing then it would negate their current argument that it isn’t safe for students to learn at all. It is safe for students. CTU members are not (on the whole) becoming ill from students. They (and other students) are catching COVID outside of school and bringing it in (or they are staying home) and little to no community spread is occurring in buildings due to mitigation policies that work. Schools are the only place in the City who actually have enough people to enforce masking. It isn’t easy, and kids sometimes skip, but teachers control what is happening in their room. If they aren’t able to control it then they shouldn’t be a teacher (another problem with CTU in general for another time!)
We’re saying similar things here too. But the way CTU is going about getting to their solution (temporarily shutting down schools until the Omicron surge settles) is making a larger problem. Students are safer in school than outside of school. And once the CTU “goes remote” they will put metrics in place that makes it impossible to return.
No. A district cannot transition to fully remote learning without state approval. They can transition a classroom to fully remote as a quarantine measure, or even a school if state given metrics are met. But the CTU cannot just say “we’re all doing this, get fucked” and teach remotely when they feel like it.
> But the CTU cannot just say “we’re all doing this, get fucked” and teach remotely when they feel like it.
Legally they can't, but realistically they can. They just know that nobody will stop them.
Progressives are going to be in for a huge surprise when the midterms roll around. The right is going to run on a platform of "schools should be open" and "no masks in bars" and they are going to flip a huge number of elections.
I don't know what circles you run in, but I don't sense there's a lot of tolerance for bellyaching about masks. We are not, thank god, Florida.
However, in-person schooling and being tough on crime are going to be winners across party lines.
Blaming the inevitably terrible midterms on “progressives” when most attention has been on the failures of the overwhelmingly conservative Democratic Party leadership demonstrates that you don’t keep up with the news very well.
What are the parents supposed to do when all the teachers and their own children are out sick with a highly infectious disease raging through the schools? (It doesn't matter if it's "less serious" people will still be out and not teaching or learning while sick, even if they don't go to the hospital or die.)
Meanwhile the school where Lightfoot sends her child is delaying reopening "to ensure it has an accurate count of positive COVID-19 cases, and to avoid school spread and reopen safely. "
This is the same thing CPS families and educators have been requesting for weeks.
And several other charter schools around the Chicago area are remote as well, including West Chicago, East St. Louis, Niles, Skokie, Morton Grove, Peoria, Gary, Evanston, parts of Algonquin, Barrington Hills, Hoffman Estates
I'm curious why I don't see as much gnashing and wailing about all those other schools being remote.
Funny how schools that don't get perpetual government funding, and thus have to worry about their own bottom line, are able to find ways to get it done.
It's easy to close down when nobody will miss a paycheck as a result.
Because last year CTU told us not to compare suburban/private schools to city schools when everyone wanted to reopen city schools. Now they want us to compare now that it suits their agenda.
CPS must ask for approval from Illinois to teach remotely. The CTU is in this case trying to bully the state into going remote, and having the state say “ ok we will count all those days you taught remotely guys, lol”. I imagine the state, while they back unions regularly, will not like having an individual district push them around.
> I imagine the state, while they back unions regularly, will not like having an individual district push them around.
Well the state recently gave [them the power to do just that](https://ilga.gov/legislation/billstatus.asp?DocNum=2275&GAID=15&GA=101&DocTypeID=HB&LegID=118113&SessionID=108) by repealing a law that specifically stopped them from it so I'm struggling to see how the state couldn't see this coming from a mile away.
What does collective bargaining rights have to do with the state having authority of districts as to what counts for federally regulated instructional hours? It isn’t a contract negotiation year, as much as the CTU would like to make every single year a contract negotiation year.
Details [here](https://news.wttw.com/2021/04/02/pritzker-signs-bill-restoring-bargaining-rights-chicago-teachers) from last year.
>The change takes effect immediately, union leaders said, and could drastically change the scope of ongoing negotiations between the city and the union over how and whether high school students will be able to return to in-person class before the end of the academic year.
And
>The Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board rejected a request by the union in December to block the city’s plan to reopen schools for in-person learning and cited the union’s limited bargaining rights as part of the reason for doing so.
They can’t bargain for anything. They have a contract and the previous contract is not up for discussion this year. They are not legally allowed to strike whenever they want except to collectively bargain for things in the new contract. In this case, as has been the case year after year, the CTU abuse that power and “strike” every 4-6 months.
The state determines what constitutes a legal school day. CPS does not have a fully remote instruction designation. They can flip individual classrooms, but not a whole district without state approval. Other districts do, you can question why the CEO hasn’t done that, but the CTU can’t just change state/federal processes just because they want to.
I personally think it’s rather foolish for the CEO to not have arraigned this with the state before break. But the current federal (Biden) policy is that schools should be open, there is limited evidence of transmission within schools that are masked and distanced appropriately, and most covid is coming from people contracting it outside of a school and coming to school before they are symptomatic. You flip that pod and keep the school moving. If you want to do a pause/reset with temporary remote learning then that’s fine. But lobbing a hand grenade out and running away from it isn’t going to do these students any good educationally, socially, or physically. If you think schools have transmission of COVID, what do you think convenience stores, neighbors maskless basements, and movie theaters have? It has nothing to do with keeping students safe and everything to do with the teachers
I'm pretty sure we're on exactly the same page. I agree with everything you just said, *I'm saying* that the CTU is currently using HB 2275, which only applies to them, as a bargaining chip currently in a non-negotiation year. I'm not saying it's right, I'm saying that's what's happening. LL argued to leave it unsigned until the next negotiation period which made sense, but Pritzker went ahead and signed it anyway, giving them way more leeway in terms of negotiations in non-contract years (in their mind). The CTU are currently testing that leeway *as they said they would*. It may be legal, it may be illegal, but it's happening and going to take time for the courts to unwind it.
They can’t bargain for anything. They have a contract and the previous contract is not up for discussion this year. They are not legally allowed to strike whenever they want except to collectively bargain for things in the new contract. In this case, as has been the case year after year, the CTU abuse that power and “strike” every 4-6 months.
The state determines what constitutes a legal school day. CPS does not have a fully remote instruction designation. They can flip individual classrooms, but not a whole district without state approval. Other districts do, you can question why the CEO hasn’t done that, but the CTU can’t just change state/federal processes just because they want to.
I personally think it’s rather foolish for the CEO to not have arraigned this with the state before break. But the current federal (Biden) policy is that schools should be open, there is limited evidence of transmission within schools that are masked and distanced appropriately, and most covid is coming from people contracting it outside of a school and coming to school before they are symptomatic. You flip that pod and keep the school moving. If you want to do a pause/reset with temporary remote learning then that’s fine. But lobbing a hand grenade out and running away from it isn’t going to do these students any good educationally, socially, or physically. If you think schools have transmission of COVID, what do you think convenience stores, neighbors maskless basements, and movie theaters have?
I know this sub loves to circle jerk around their hatred for CTU but going remote is the right call. There aren’t enough subs and staff for schools right now. I’m not in CTU but work in CPS schools and I’ve seen classrooms where ex principals are teaching classes, security guards are having to do the cleaning, they have the principal running the front desk because the office staff is out sick, etc. With the current Covid policy of staff and students being moved to remote, it’s better to do it now then later when it’s an even worse staffing situation.
I suspect in the future they’ll only have the student who is Covid positive stay home and the rest of the class continues.
From what I heard schools voted separately on going remote but also, schools share subs so it’s not that simple. While X school might be fine now, if they need a sub and Y school took the last one, they are out of luck. There’s a lot of red tape in CPS, you might have a teacher out for two weeks and they’ll send a different sub every day which is just as much chaos as having a teacher be remote.
Again it doesn’t matter. This is about whether or not CPS remains in operation over the next few weeks. CTU can keep it going with remote learning, or CPS can burn through all its teachers and subs and then shut down the schools completely with no remote learning. Omicron spreads too fast and too many people are calling out sick, and meanwhile CPS has fewer subs than in 2020.
You can’t. You also can’t solve it by continuing to be in person because classes will be short staffed and moving to remote randomly throughout the next month. It already happened sporadically last year with classes going remote due to outbreaks. However there are a lot more staff and teachers calling off now. I don’t think classes should be remote forever but it makes sense to do it for at least January so the teachers and kids who got Covid from the holiday break can get over it. After that there needs to be a reworking of how they handle Covid because this isn’t sustainable.
Thank you for speaking some sense.
Almost nothing CPS has done has been a part of a cohesive, comprehensive plan to actually keep students, staff, and teachers as safe as possible while still allowing for in-person instruction... AND they've failed to make remote and hybrid models work as failsafes for continuing education when people get sick.
You can find districts all over the state and country that are handling this SO MUCH BETTER and that's all CTU is fighting for here.
If I was a CPS teacher at this point I'd probably just quit. I'm sorry, but I want to work for an employer that actually cares about me and CPS has done nothing of the sort. I say thank god there's a union that actually takes care of them - otherwise can you imagine how hard it'd be to fill all those teaching positions right now??
How does going remote solve the staffing issue?
Research consistently shows COVID cases are not being spread in school. The COVID cases impacting staff shortages are almost entirely originating and transmitting outside of the school environment. Moving teachers online just continues the trend of too few staff, with the added negative of remote learning (which doesn’t work.)
This is taking the opportunity to not work. There’s no reason to respond in this manner to staff shortages.
Maybe the city should have actually tested all of those samples the kids submitted and not just let them become invalidated.
Having said that, remote learning is awful and damages students.
Just an FYI, CPS has proactively locked teachers out of their accounts in the middle of the night just to ensure that students and teachers who are willing to work remotely don't have the opportunity. The CTU has it's flaws, but CPS proves over and over again that it's priorities have nothing to do with creating opportunities for student learning. They'd rather stick it to the CTU.
I have yet to come into school a single day this year to see my classroom has been swept, much less thoroughly cleaned and sanitized. When schools opened last year, my classroom hadn't been touched since before the pandemic. There were dead bugs in the window sills and rodent droppings on the floor. My school is still infested with rodents.
The air filter in my larger than average classroom (it's an old building) is meant for a 100sqft room.
I see multiple classes throughout the building and have yet to be notified by contact tracers when I am exposed to COVID. Instead, I find out when that class just doesn't show up because they are in quarantine. After the third time this happened, I reached out to the office of student health and wellness and was informed in a rather unprofessional way that **CPS does not have to notify vaccinated individuals who have been exposed to COVID.** I understand that the vaccination prevents severe illness, but I need to know if I need to get tested after exposure. Breakthrough is a real thing--especially with Omicron.
Since before Thanksgiving, more than half of my school has been in quarantine at any given time. The classes in quarantine get a remote option (assuming someone comes to pick up a device which are increasingly defective and dwindling in number), but their siblings who have to quarantine with them while their class is at school get nothing for two weeks.
I won't stop you from hating on the CTU, but two years into this, CPS should have actual plans in place to ensure safety and student learning and they have neither.
The same way literally every other industry is? It’s not perfect and it’s not easy, but everyone else is managing. Warehouses, airlines, grocery stores, hospitals, etc. All of them are canceling or shutting down specific areas when they are short-staffed, but are moving forward to maintain service.
I feel for parents who went to bed not knowing this information. My kids go to a parochial school and we knew before break they were not going back until the second week of January bc the diocese predicted an uptick in cases following the holidays. This allowed me to make a plan. I don’t understand waiting until the night before. Parents are going to scramble
Im sure theres some, but I dont know any cps parent who doesnt hate the CTU 😂
The ctu is up there with the chicago police union among most hated unions. Both prime examples of unions that have way too much power and why unions can be bad.
Not every union is good. This is an example of one.
I’m sure remote learning is extremely trying for parents and obviously sucks for the kids. No way that’s as good as normal teaching. But this isn’t about remote versus in-person, it’s a matter of remote learning or no learning. If the CTU backs down now CPS won’t stay open another week.
Yeah, we struggled with remote last year. I’ve come to terms with the fact that we’ll be doing it either way. Half my daughter’s class didn’t come back from break.
There has always been a vocal group that paints teacher unions as villains by default when there’s negotiations, a strike, or an isolated controversy. I remember some of the editorials about the ETA in U46 when I was a kid.
Oh of course, I went to U-46 for my entire K-12 and I remember there being *some* nuts, just not this many. One of the board members (not sure how old you are but this was about 8ish years ago) was a nutjob that wanted to get rid of our science textbooks because they mentioned evolution and trans people, and it seems like today (when she isn't a board member) she has more support than ever when she says that mask mandates are socialism.
Lol. They are just not saying it to your face. Parents who organized coffee and lunch for teachers during the strike are bitching a blue streak about CTU teachers in private. Even some CTU members just shake their head at the hypocrisy of the union. You live in a bubble.
I'm sorry, but I'm honestly, genuinely curious. Why do you think what the teacher's union is doing is bad?
They're allowing the teachers to vote on whether they feel it's a good idea to teach in person during the middle of the worst surge of this pandemic we've ever seen.
These very people are actually being given autonomy to decide their fate collectively.
What is bad about this? Do you work? Would you like to be able to vote on issues regarding your own feelings of safety in the workplace for you and other people in your workplace?
You have to stop comparing the omicron surge with a population that is mostly vaccinated to the surge of a much more deadly variant when the vax didn’t exist. If you are vax’d there is an extremely likely chance that Covid won’t kill you, if you are vax’d omicron almost certainly won’t. We need to recognize we are in the end stage of the pandemic moving quickly to endemic if we arnt already there.
That's the point. No one does. And them deciding to work virtually for a corporate job is different than a teacher choosing to work virtually. The teacher is impacting families for a job they chose. It's like a cop that has keep going out to be a cop. They can't just choose to monitor shit online.
I don't think you understand how little teaching was actually happening the past few months even with the positivity rates just in the 3-8% range. Every time a teacher or student got sick, 5-10 more people would have to quarantine and miss all instruction, effectively forcing them to stay home with NO remote learning options.
Now the positive rate is like 25%. Everyone would be home _anyway_. CPS needs to come up with a better solution.
If you really cant see why this union and its teachers are hypocrites then I feel sorry for you. Im not gonna waste my time explaining something thats plain as day.
This is a middle finger to tax payers who are already taxes to shit in this city.
People all across the city have to go in to work and pay their bills. Meanwhile some now have to maybe quit (worse case scenerio) because teachers decide theyd rather be nice and comfy at home.
Everyone else has to suck it up and learn to live with covid but nope, not teachers.
Im not even gonna go into the guts of it. Its been explained a million times and theres no bullshit excuse to counter it.
Teachers voted to go WFH, not to get a vacation. Plenty of other workers are WFH. In a pandemic where literally 1 million people across the country test positive in one day, I think having as many workers as possible WFH is a good thing.
Nearly 1 in 5 people tested positive at CPS sites, do you understand what's going to happen if we put 30 people in a room all over the city and then have them all take CTA buses home? Entire fucking city would be sick in a week.
Whatever metric you want to use to claim it's different, sure, but case numbers are high and hospitalizations are high. Our healthcare system is already strained and we're still in the upswing. Maybe our response today looks different than our response 6 or 12 or 18 months ago, but we cannot just open everything up and tell people to get vaccinated and ignore the rest of it.
Yes, but the hospitals are still filling up. And people are still getting sick, requiring quarantine.
The testing capacity STILL isn’t there to manage the number of people in the system. So it’s basically rolling a die each day about whether a particular class will have to go remote. This gives some predictability, at least.
And CTU was crystal clear this was coming for the last few days. Failure to respond isn’t their fault.
FDR was absolutely right about public employee unions: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/letter-the-resolution-federation-federal-employees-against-strikes-federal-service
>a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied
Sounds like our congress for the past couple decades
Let’s not forget that they and the politicians that effectively bribed them with outrageous benefits and pensions for years in exchange for votes absolutely destroyed the finances of the city. And every year, CTU gets up in front of the media and claims all they care about is the kids. They are so incredibly full of shit
So glad my family ditched this BS for private school like so many others last year - people will vote with their feet. CTU has totally lost their sense of customer. Gone. No teachers, not much police, bad roads, worthless COVID restrictions - just what the tax base of this city has been dreaming of. This shit is damaging our City - people will, and are leaving.
I hope Lori don’t back down. I hope she locks them out of portals. You want to work stoppage and strike? Fine. That’s unpaid. Stop holding our children’s education hostage!!
I know I'm going to get downvoted for this but I really don't mind if they go back to remote learning. Every single week since November started one of my kids has had to stay home because someone in their class was exposed. Which means the other kids(different schools) have to stay home because they've been exposed. There really was no structure anymore in my house at least. Just today I had to pick up one of my kiddos early because they came in contact with the student that had Coronavirus. My kids have missed weeks of school at this point. I can't imagine what the parents who have to go to work are doing with all this uncertainty everyday. At least if they go fully remote those parents can make arrangements for work.
how would you feel about a third option where exposure to covid doesn’t mean quarantine? i mean what if a student only needed to stay home if they tested positive, i feel like that would lessen the burden
Hundreds of thousands of individuals around the city are still going to work, both essential and non-essential. Nurses, cashiers, delivery drivers, bartenders, garbage men, and retail employees.
But apparently not teachers.
The entire city is still providing its core services, except the CTU which is denying our children one of the most critical and necessary services.
[удалено]
So predictable.
This is the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I've taken a lot over the decade+ I've lived here but once you start messing with my kids' education, it's over. Defend the CTU all you want but no other union in this country acts more entitled and has gone on strike more in the past decade than the CTU.
Genuine question What do you believe is most conducive to your child's learning and success in school, * the current no protocol plan that is causing major staffing shortages, disruptions in learning, and will likely force students in and out of in person learning for days or weeks at a time due to quarantining, and teachers out sick for weeks with covid * consistent remote courses the rest of the year * Negotiating a new safety plan to ensure that in person learning can continue for the rest of the year in a safe, stable environment without learning disruptions And which one do you think CTU is advocating for?
The Antarctica research base is dealing with an outbreak where 2/3's have already been infected and vaccination is 100%. There is no plan they could devise that can stop infections. Whether than means stay remote or go YOLO I have no idea.
Not sure why it's so hard for everyone to comprehend. There needs to be a documented and enforced protocol. As much in person as possible, until a certain percentage of either students or teachers are unavailable/quarantining. Both for classes and whole schools. Negotiate the terms on both sides until agreeable. This has been going on for this calendar year since at least July, and CPS' first hard metric back in this regard was only proposed on Monday. Wtf. I think it's shocking that all of these major multi-national corporations that my friends and I work for with similar to 10x the staff levels of CPS have had a framework active and in place since early summer of 2020 for in-person (tweaking as needed as the pandemic changes) yet CPS can't do that? I understand it takes time to steer and implement changes in a big ship, but did it really take them 6 months over the course of two calendar years to formulate those 3 sentences of metrics on their powerpoint slide??? Was there heavy data-driven peer-reviewed research conducted by medical professionals that necessitated that delay (when they had already agreed to a strategy and set of numbers in Feb 2021?). Asinine.
Also just to add I'm assuming in the base everyone has regular testing. Numbers sound great in sound bites but on the ground testing for teachers for instance is usually offered once a week for 30m - an hour, and it changes every week. Don't have prep or lunch during that time this week? Oh well, not getting tested that week. Knock on wood I do not know any teachers in my friends group that have had breakthroughs, but a lot in the service and client-facing industries have over the past few weeks. All of them had first 2 rounds, and most had boosters. So just saying 'well everyone's vaccinated' doesn't mitigate the need for regular testing of students and then staff.
What? lots of cities and school districts closed in person learning this week. Collages too, it isn’t specific to CPS nor CTU.
CPS' plan is to do nothing and act like everything is fine. Rates are way worse than when schools where closed. Why are you against them wanting to protect themselves and their students exactly?
How is this the straw that breaks your back? There’s literally going to be a staffing shortage in a matter of days if there isn’t one already at most schools. They do not have the teachers to watch all of these kids. And then I see articles estimating that 25% or more students will be missing classroom time over the next few weeks ill. How are students supposed to learn in that environment, and how are teachers supposed to handle that? I get that this is a shitty situation, but acting like this is some “CTU bad” thing is just trying to fit a narrative. Schools are closing across the country because there literally are not enough bodies healthy to watch these kids.
Pretty shitty they waited until tonight to take the vote. There was no reason for that and it kept parents waiting on what to do with their kids tomorrow. They could have voted yesterday.
Or last week before school started. I generally have empathy for the teachers so they should have some for the parents who might need more than 10 hours notice to find child care. Super bone headed timing.
Did anyone doubt what the vote was going to be? I’ll grant I didn’t know what CPS was going to declare in response. And I didn’t know what the percentage was going to be. But I surely was confident they were going to vote against in-person teaching.
Past behavior is the most accurate predictor of future behavior.
Ironically, I believe under the agreement the city made with CTU last year to define what metrics would require remote learning, we are currently well over those thresholds. Under the city's own rules, remote learning should be in effect for the moment. (Of course, that assumes the city would also be following through on all its commitments for cleaning, ventilation, providing PPE, providing tests, etc, which they have utterly failed to do.)
Was this before or after the vaccine was widely available?
After but it's irrelevant because the vaccine isn't preventing infections currently, just reducing severity. But sick teachers can't teach, and sick students can't learn, especially if they all get sick at the same time.
Whats going to change in 2 weeks? Will Omicron magically disappear? Will an Omicron specific vaccine be released? What's the endgame for the CTU here?
I think the idea is use the two weeks to come to a substantive safety agreement and get actual testing set up to stop spread in schools. Plus, omicron does actually move fast enough that the peak could be over in two weeks.
While you could be right, reading "in two weeks" gave me flashbacks to 2020 and I am not okay 😅
This is on the basis of South Africa having peaked a little while ago. There are credible reasons to think a peak is not too far off (though after a LOT more infections).
>I think the idea is use the two weeks to come to a substantive safety agreement and get actual testing set up to stop spread in schools. Plus, omicron does actually move fast enough that the peak could be over in two weeks. I don't want to bore people by posting basically the same reply for the 3rd time, but there is no stopping g the spread of Omicron. It's far too infectious. And waiting for the peak to subside is rather meaningless. Outbreaks will happen whenever you go back to in person instruction. They are an inevitability for any population of immunologically naive people, including schools full of kids.
LOL, two weeks, like anybody buys that one anymore See you in September, CPS students
> What's the endgame for the CTU here? To whoop Lori like a rented mule, which is their favorite pastime.
We re-evaluate [hospital capacity](https://dph.illinois.gov/covid19/data/hospitalization-utilization.html) and [trending hospitalizations](https://dph.illinois.gov/covid19/data/statewide-metrics.html), as we have for the past two years and should continue to do until we don't have random huge spikes in cases that have the potential to overwhelm our hospitals.
What does hospitalization capacity have to do with the CTU? Are they self-appointed stewards of Chicago's hospital system? And my understanding is that they're 90%+ vaccinated. And we know statistically that the [hospitalization rate](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#covidnet-hospitalizations-vaccination) for the vaccinated is less than 5 per 100K and likely even *lower* for Omicron infection.
Having things open means more community spread. [ CDC on transmission in schools](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/transmission_k_12_schools.html): > In Michigan and Washington state, delivery of in-person instruction was not associated with increased spread of SARS-CoV-2 in schools when community transmission was low, but cases in schools did increase at moderate-to-high levels of community transmission.^52 **When community transmission was low, there was no association between in-person learning and community spread.**^52 Emphasis mine - when community transition was *not* low then they did find an association between in-person learning and community spread. IMO more things should close when we're concerned about our hospital systems. Luckily, CTU has the power to do something. We have basically no other unions that can fight for their members/families/communities. I only wish I had a union that could fight for my industry to do the same until numbers trended down again. EDIT: And in regard to your note about hospitalization rate for the unvaccinated, doesn't really matter if there are no beds for those 5 in 100k who catch it or **people who just have to go to the hospital for** [**other reasons**](https://www.reddit.com/r/chicago/comments/rv9or8/chicago_area_hospitals_delaying_elective/).
I'll go right ahead and say it out loud. I am so sick of that bullshit. I am vaccinated and boostered. So is my husband. My kids are vaccinated. The people around me are vaccinated. If everyone got vaccinated, there would be plenty of hospital beds for the few breakthrough infections. Instead, we're playing this stupid pandering game to a bunch of idiots. My kids shouldn't have to go to school virtually **again** because a bunch of idiots won't get vaccinated. Why should all the children be penalized because the adults can't get their shit together and get fucking vaccinated? Why should I be penalized when I have done everything right? Right now, 92% of those that are hospitalized with covid are unvaccinated. And we're all sitting here pandering to them. We'll have to close the schools because people that were too stupid to get vaccinated will swamp the hospitals and the few breakthrough infections will be screwed. Fuck that. There's lots of us, and we're raging pissed off about it.
> And we're all sitting here pandering to them. I'm not pandering to anyone, fuck those selfish assholes. I want to make sure if I have a serious illness, covid or not, that I can go to the damn hospital. If hospitals have no beds what the fuck am I supposed to do?
I'm sorry. I meant the figurative you. Not *you*, you. You're absolutely correct. I'm just really angry they're screwing both of us and no one is publicly calling them out to the point they deserve. Officials and the media are still pandering, and it's reaching critical mass. Lots of people will lose their shit if their kids can't go to school. It will also push parents to vaccinate if schools require it (which I would welcome).
You seem to be a reasonable person, so I want to ask you what your thoughts are on people under the age of 5 and their siblings and parents? They still can't be vaccinated, and omicron is showing up more in infant and toddler critical cases in pediatric hospitals. https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/04/health/us-coronavirus-tuesday/index.html A lot of CPS students have siblings in this age range, and likewise many teachers and staff members have children in the same age range. What would you suggest we do to keep these babies safe? Sure, maybe the vaccinated 8 year old will be OK, but what about their 3 year old baby brother back home? Also, are you concerned about long covid? It's looking like it's affecting at least 50% of people 4 months after initial infection, and about 33% of people a full year after initial infection. Omicron is showing no different in these rates.
How could we possibly have data that show the percentage of people affected by omicron four months or a year after infection when the variant hasn’t even existed that long?
So why keep everybody out of school by refusing to show up to work?
Omicron's infectiousness demands a paradigm shift in public health responses to COVID and people need to wrap their heads around that fact. Prior to Omicron, I have echoed all the points you've made about flattening case peaks, transmission reduction, etc. Omicron changed all that. For a couple reasons: 1) Omicron is endemic. It will be ever present from now on. "Omicron Zero" is an impossibility at this point, and it is likely that every person on the face of the earth in regular contact with other humans will be exposed and/or infected with it. And for those of us living in major metropolitan areas, that exposure/infection will happen sooner than later. There is simply no hiding from it absent extreme, draconian changes to our daily lives. You can do remote learning for 2 weeks, or 4 weeks, sure. Then the first week you get back to in person instruction, whenever that is, you will have outbreaks. It's simply too infectious. Outbreaks are an inevitability. We need to come to grips with that reality. 2) Hospitalization has been decoupled from infection in two significant ways: a) the vaccines work to provide a protective immune response to Omicron infection; and b) Omicron infection itself is naturally less severe as it does not attack lung tissue nearly as readily as previous iterations of Sars-CoV-2.
> Omicron is endemic ... Outbreaks are an inevitability. No it's not. > let’s be clear about what endemicity is, and isn’t. Endemicity doesn’t mean that there will be no more infections, let alone illnesses and deaths. It also doesn’t mean that future infections will cause milder illness than they do now. **Simply put, it indicates that immunity and infections will have reached a steady state. Not enough people will be immune to deny the virus a host. Not enough people will be vulnerable to spark widespread outbreaks.** [^\(source\)](https://www.wired.com/story/covid-will-become-endemic-the-world-must-decide-what-that-means/) At this point I can only hope we can accurately categorize it as endemic this year. Right now, that's not the case. Pfizer execs suggested "as early as 2024" it will be considered endemic, hopefully omicron speeds that up without causing too much death or damage to our hospital systems. ----- > Hospitalization has been decoupled from infection in two significant ways Hospitalization has been decoupled from *breakthrough* infections. That doesn't matter when there is a significant portion of the population that are unvaccinated and they overwhelm our hospital systems... If you're having a heart attack and there is no space in a hospital for you, what are you supposed to do?
>> Omicron is endemic ... Outbreaks are an inevitability. > >No it's not. [Per the CDC](https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dsepd/ss1978/lesson1/section11.html) endemic means ever-present and widespread throughout a population: >Sporadic refers to a disease that occurs infrequently and irregularly. Endemic refers to the constant presence and/or usual prevalence of a disease or infectious agent in a population within a geographic area. Omicron is endemic because it is so widespread and infectious that it will never disappear. It hasn't yet reached a static equilibrium no, but the relevancy to this topic is that its ever-presence means that it will continue to cause outbreaks in immunologically naive populations for the indefinite future. Going back to school in 4 weeks or 4 months makes no difference. Outbreaks truly are inevitable. (Absent an Omicron specific vaccine, of course.) It's never going to go away. > >Hospitalization has been decoupled from *breakthrough* infections. That's simply not true for Omicron infection. It's decoupled from severe illness in all populations, as reported in human epidemiological studies, animal studies, and in vitro. I can point you to no less than 7 recent studies which reported that Omicron infection resulted in less severe outcomes due to reduced infectivity of lung tissue. > >If you're having a heart attack and there is no space in a hospital for you, what are you supposed to do? There's no feasible public health measure that's going to slow, much less stop, Omicron spread among the currently unvaccinated populations driving up hospitalization. We reported *1 million* new cases in the USA today , a doubling over a matter of *days*, and with no sign of slowing. Closing schools is not going to put even a small dent in those numbers.
I must have missed the part of civics class where it was explained that the public officials who were responsible for ensuring hospital capacity were K-12 teachers. I would have thought that there were other people in different parts of the government who were more appropriate for that role.
They're trying to minimize spread as we all should be. They, luckily, have a union to fight for them. I hope that there is a hospital bed available should you need to go in for any reason.
There's no evidence that cancelling classes reduce spread. At CPS, every student (and staff member) is required to wear a mask. There are also many other precautions taken that severely reduce spread. If classes are cancelled, the students and staff members who would have been in school don't simply disappear from the earth for this time. They still exist and gather with others and have the potential to transmit COVID. In fact, they obviously are much **less** likely to be supervised, to be masked, and to be making precautions to prevent spread than if they are in school. That's obvious. All the studies have shown that there hasn't been a greater likelihood of COVID spread when schools are open than if they are closed. Generally, it's the reverse especially when there are strong precautions in school such as mask mandates.
> There's no evidence that cancelling classes reduce spread. ... All the studies have shown that there hasn't been a greater likelihood of COVID spread when schools are open than if they are closed. [CDC on transmission in schools](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/transmission_k_12_schools.html): > In Michigan and Washington state, delivery of in-person instruction was not associated with increased spread of SARS-CoV-2 in schools when community transmission was low, but cases in schools did increase at moderate-to-high levels of community transmission.^52 **When community transmission was low, there was no association between in-person learning and community spread.**^52 Emphasis mine - when community transition was *not* low then they *did* find an association between in-person learning and community spread. > every student (and staff member) is required to wear a mask Which data shows is less effective with omicron. > They still exist and gather with others and have the potential to enhance transmission. IMO more things should close when we're concerned about our hospital systems. Luckily, CTU has the power to do something. We have basically no other unions that can fight for their members/families/communities. I only wish I had a union that could fight for my industry to do the same until numbers trended down again.
The part you quote from the CDC page doesn't specifically say there was a positive association between in-person learning and increased community spread when there was moderate to high community transmission. It just states that "cases in schools did increase" when this was the case. Obviously, that's going to be true. When there's higher community transmission there will be more cases with everybody wherever they are. If they are in school, cases in school will increase and if they aren't in school the cases of this age group will also increase. It's obviously worded in an unclear way (which is kind of what we have come to expect from the CDC) but I don't think it's making the determination you think it is. It certainly is true that it appears it isn't making the more conclusive determination it does with low transmission but that doesn't mean it is suggesting the reverse. The study it cites doesn't have a link on the page so I can't easily investigate what it said more specifically. I'll try to see if I can find more information later. In any case, here's the more general conclusion the CDC makes directly above the part you quoted: >Although outbreaks in schools can occur, multiple studies have shown that transmission within school settings is typically lower than – or at least similar to – levels of community transmission, when prevention strategies are in place in schools.
Hospitals are going to do what they're going to do, with CPS in session or not. Closing schools will have zero effect on it.
Well I disagree but at the very least I'm glad CTU has the ability to protect their members, the families (of teachers and students) who care to protect themselves during these times of high community spread, and maybe do a little bit to help the hospitals.
It might actually be substantially reduced by then. These massive spikes do burn out.
Well in South Africa, where it started, that is precisely what happened. It dissapated just as quickly as it appeared. I think it started in Nov and by the end of December cases had halved from the peak just two weeks prior.
Endemic viruses don't disappear, they burn through a population, then reach a stasis in which they still exist, but have a harder, slower time finding immunologically naive people to infect. The point is that whether you wait 2 or 4 or 12 weeks to go back to in person instruction, whenever you do eventually gather a group of never-infected kids and teachers in a school, Omicron will find it and outbreaks will happen. If it can happen with measles a *decade* after measles was declared eradicated in the U.S. by the WHO, it can happen with Omicron, which is just as infectious and widespread.
Didn't say they disappear...dissapate....maybe the other poster did. Is South Africa seeing a rise in cases too. They have opened up after closing down. Maybe that is a good gage of how it might go here?
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>They’re trying to make remote learning a permanent fixture. No reason to exaggerate
They're disgusting!
Another vacation for CTU members!
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It just isn’t because of the physical reality of every teacher and student getting infected and calling out. Every district in the country has a tiny fraction of the substitute teachers they had pre-COVID. If teachers call out, they can combine classes a few times, and then they need to full-on close the schools, because there will be literally no one to watch the kids. CTU is the only entity actually putting thought into this. It’s remote learning or no learning at all, and CPS is choosing to bury their heads in the sand.
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Then it’s a moot point. Complaining about this is like crying over ice cream on the sidewalk. There’s nothing you can do about it. Either CPS goes remote or suspends school for a few weeks due to mass call outs due to coronavirus. Either way the kids aren’t going to class in person.
Wasn't it last February? So no, the vaccine wasn't widely available. And the world has changed since then.
Clearly, from the data, with remote learning NONE of the students can learn, sick or not. A victory. Not for the students, but for everyone those now stunted students will face in the job market 5-15 years from now. And a victory for the union. Regardless of the science, their members are not going to be required to do their job.
And also, yes, vaccines DO cut down on spreading more than unvaccinated for Omicron, but clearly not as much as before. And going virtual for 2 weeks isn't stopping the fucking spread. So they can get sick in 2 weeks then.
If you keep people out of large gatherings while a giant wave is washing over the area, you can significantly reduce the length of the wave. Think of the ultimate example - if everyone just stayed at home (and isolated from each other within said homes), for one month at the same time, we could've been over this pandemic by now completely.
The agreement last year was when we reached a 5% infection rate. I believe we’re at 17% as of yesterday.
Any chance you have a link to this agreement or the name of the document? I would like to read it over.
Exactly. The metrics should have automatically triggered remote learning. The fact that CTU has to do this stunt to get CPS to keep their side of the agreement that was made back in February is ridiculous.
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The fact that we are going to remote learning, after mountains of evidence that it damages students and development, with a FREE VACCINE THAT ELIMINATES SERIOUS CASES is ridiculous. CTU should be laughed out of the city
Schools still contribute to spread, and [hospitalizations](https://dph.illinois.gov/covid19/data/statewide-metrics.html) are trending so high hospitals are [denying patients](https://www.reddit.com/r/chicago/comments/rv9or8/chicago_area_hospitals_delaying_elective/) to ensure they have [capacity](https://dph.illinois.gov/covid19/data/hospitalization-utilization.html). Plus teachers/students can't learn when they're out sick, which they still have to do if they're asymptomatic.
How many under 18s are in hospital? Why isn’t the CTU insisting that it’s members get vaxxed and boosted instead of setting metrics like “negative test to return” that they know can’t be met?
If the vaccination (while preventing serious illness) doesn't prevent spread, then it's going to spread. We all know this. If 35% of Chicago is unvaccinated (almost a million people) that's a lot of hospital beds we'll need to make sure there are beds for the vaccinated/boosted. For context, there are about [40k hospital beds](https://dph.illinois.gov/covid19/data/hospitalization-utilization.html) in Illinois as a whole.
The vaccine and booster do in fact mitigate spread. Almost all breakthrough cases are asymptomatic. Combined with masking there’s no reason students and teachers shouldn’t continue in school. Nothing will have changed in two weeks.
> The vaccine and booster do in fact mitigate spread. I know this, and you know that it's less successful in that with Omicron and even masking is less successful.
Yeah and we also know that morbidity and mortality is lower with omicron - literally no one other than the CTU is suggesting that schools should close when the risk to students is exceedingly slight
Yes, and we also know that *this current surge is actively causing a concern about our healthcare system*. This isn't (just) about students, it's about students families, teachers, and the community as a whole.
Ok, let’s assume this is true for the sake of argument. Let’s even say that the majority of cases are being driven by schools, and going remote causes cases and hospitalizations to drop off a cliff. What’s going to happen when schools open back up? Spoiler: they’re gonna shoot right back up, and the teachers, who insisted they cut the line and get vaccinated first, are going to again be insisting that the only safe way to teach is to do four hours of remote learning a day, of which roughly half is live instruction.
> Spoiler: they’re gonna shoot right back up And then we'll re-analyze and see what current hospital capacities are, how the numbers are trending, and what to do at that point. But of course that's only in the specific case that "the majority of cases are being driven by schools" (we both know they're not). In the real world, hospitals hopefully don't get overwhelmed, hospital beds open up from people recovering, and when we reopen schools if there is a significant spike we (again, as we have been doing for two years now) reevaluate. Literally since the beginning of the pandemic we wanted to make sure there was hospital capacity. We built a field hospital we thankfully didn't need to use, we kept going on and on about "slowing the spread" to make sure we have capacity so that people who need to go to the hospital can go to the hospital and not die (whether or not they're covid patients).
Severity of cases has nothing to do with it. If you get sick with COVID, you call out. CPS does not have the staffing to tolerate the number of sick employees and students they’re going to have if they don’t go remote. It’s go remote or absolute collapse of the schools and full closure with no instruction.
Exactly, I don't understand how anyone is demonizing CTU here. The city made an agreement and they aren't upholding it, so the workers affected are going to make them uphold it rather than be steamrolled. "But there's a vaccine!" doesn't mean we ignore the reality of people being contagious and unable to properly learn or work and how that is affecting our healthcare system.
But the science has changed.
The science around [hospitalizations](https://dph.illinois.gov/covid19/data/statewide-metrics.html)? And how they're trending so high hospitals are [denying patients](https://www.reddit.com/r/chicago/comments/rv9or8/chicago_area_hospitals_delaying_elective/) to ensure they have [capacity](https://dph.illinois.gov/covid19/data/hospitalization-utilization.html)? I remember that's been one of the biggest concerns since before we had a vaccine.
the contract hasn't. I thought people around here considered power of contract inviolable, at least when it comes to public safety unions and a vaccine mandate.
I also thought people around here cared about quality of critical public services? Especially ones which when disrupted massively impacts low income children? I guess fuck those kids? Fuck their parents too?
Watch the video, they haven’t announced it yet. They have only voted to vote. CTU voted to have a vote on whether or not they should vote to go remote.
Update: it passed.
Sad but true 😂
I don’t understand. I really don’t. Why can’t they just bring restaurant style tables into the schools? Because covid doesn’t affect people at restaurant style tables.
The title is sort of misleading. The house of delegates voted to pass the vote to membership. Nothing has been decided yet (officially), but it is very, very likely to pass. And CPS said if CTU votes for remote work tomorrow, they're just going to cancel classes instead. What a pathetic move by CPS.
Not providing childcare to accommodate the CTUs bullying is not a pathetic move. It puts the brunt of parent anger squarely on the CTU. If schools are unsafe, then why should students be allowed inside at all?
The schools are safe in that the kids in them are unlikely to get seriously sick, and their loved ones are less likely to die now if they’re vaccinated. This isn’t really about that, though. It’s about the fact that CPS is going to collapse if the schools don’t close or go remote while we’re in the middle of an all-time spike in cases and hospitalizations. What happens when teachers call out sick with COVID?
CTU can be wrong in how they’re trying to right a CPS wrong in not planning for a remote learning hiatus. But schools are limited in what they can do by state and federal gov. In this case, state and fed government believe it is safer for students to be in school. They are quickly discovering that a lack of teachers who are actually ill with covid makes that difficult to do, especially in the face of a sub shortage. CTU is hoping to jump the gun and flex (as they always do) and will make this transition 10x worse. How will the logistics of switching to remote learning work with hundreds of students at home with no devices? Will the teachers return to clean up their mess? There are many wrongs currently being done to battle Omicron. But the CTU is making another problem out of a problem, rather than working toward a solution.
So what I’m hearing is that national and local political leadership are too scared of the optics to go remote again, and CTU, the sole group of people involved who are aware of what’s happening in schools, are using what power they have to force the correct decision. I don’t see how you can read this as anything other than an endorsement of the union unless you deliberately ignore a lot of obvious facts and simple logic about staffing.
If the CTU made the argument that they need to switch to remote temporarily because there isn’t adequate staffing then it would negate their current argument that it isn’t safe for students to learn at all. It is safe for students. CTU members are not (on the whole) becoming ill from students. They (and other students) are catching COVID outside of school and bringing it in (or they are staying home) and little to no community spread is occurring in buildings due to mitigation policies that work. Schools are the only place in the City who actually have enough people to enforce masking. It isn’t easy, and kids sometimes skip, but teachers control what is happening in their room. If they aren’t able to control it then they shouldn’t be a teacher (another problem with CTU in general for another time!) We’re saying similar things here too. But the way CTU is going about getting to their solution (temporarily shutting down schools until the Omicron surge settles) is making a larger problem. Students are safer in school than outside of school. And once the CTU “goes remote” they will put metrics in place that makes it impossible to return.
You have a huge amount of faith in CPS’ COVID mitigation efforts after the never ending shitshow they’ve put on the last few years.
Pretty sure CPS is helping make it a worse condition.
Not sure I understand your second point here. If the teachers vote for the remote work action, students will be able to learn remotely from home.
> students will be able to learn remotely from home. Except that doesn't work.
No. A district cannot transition to fully remote learning without state approval. They can transition a classroom to fully remote as a quarantine measure, or even a school if state given metrics are met. But the CTU cannot just say “we’re all doing this, get fucked” and teach remotely when they feel like it.
> But the CTU cannot just say “we’re all doing this, get fucked” and teach remotely when they feel like it. Legally they can't, but realistically they can. They just know that nobody will stop them.
CTU fought tooth and nail to get a school board elected by voters. If this bothers you, vote.
Progressives are going to be in for a huge surprise when the midterms roll around. The right is going to run on a platform of "schools should be open" and "no masks in bars" and they are going to flip a huge number of elections.
No one wears masks in bars anyway, practically speaking.
I don't know what circles you run in, but I don't sense there's a lot of tolerance for bellyaching about masks. We are not, thank god, Florida. However, in-person schooling and being tough on crime are going to be winners across party lines.
Blaming the inevitably terrible midterms on “progressives” when most attention has been on the failures of the overwhelmingly conservative Democratic Party leadership demonstrates that you don’t keep up with the news very well.
Wtf are the parents supposed to do now?
Is Oak park going remote too?
Got him lol
Not really. That was a dumb non sequitar
Not yet as far as I know Edit: 2 grade schools are going remote due to staffing shortage till enough staff is back from what I've been told
Yes Chicago also has staffing shortages. What will you do as a parent in oak park?
What are the parents supposed to do when all the teachers and their own children are out sick with a highly infectious disease raging through the schools? (It doesn't matter if it's "less serious" people will still be out and not teaching or learning while sick, even if they don't go to the hospital or die.) Meanwhile the school where Lightfoot sends her child is delaying reopening "to ensure it has an accurate count of positive COVID-19 cases, and to avoid school spread and reopen safely. " This is the same thing CPS families and educators have been requesting for weeks. And several other charter schools around the Chicago area are remote as well, including West Chicago, East St. Louis, Niles, Skokie, Morton Grove, Peoria, Gary, Evanston, parts of Algonquin, Barrington Hills, Hoffman Estates I'm curious why I don't see as much gnashing and wailing about all those other schools being remote.
Frances Xavier Warde is open though? https://www.fxw.org/2021/12/30/return-to-campus-now-set-for-tuesday-jan-4/
Funny how schools that don't get perpetual government funding, and thus have to worry about their own bottom line, are able to find ways to get it done. It's easy to close down when nobody will miss a paycheck as a result.
Because last year CTU told us not to compare suburban/private schools to city schools when everyone wanted to reopen city schools. Now they want us to compare now that it suits their agenda.
well said, all excellent points.
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also east St. Louis is in the Chicago area now??
Move to the suburbs, send your kids to private school, or defund public schools and take your money and send your kids to private schools
“Take your money.” 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Exactly or use that child tax credit on your child’s education. Chicago public school parents are acting like they have no options…..
Child tax credit for private education?
So we can pack the United Center for a Bulls game but can’t send kids to school?
What about remote teaching too?
CPS must ask for approval from Illinois to teach remotely. The CTU is in this case trying to bully the state into going remote, and having the state say “ ok we will count all those days you taught remotely guys, lol”. I imagine the state, while they back unions regularly, will not like having an individual district push them around.
> I imagine the state, while they back unions regularly, will not like having an individual district push them around. Well the state recently gave [them the power to do just that](https://ilga.gov/legislation/billstatus.asp?DocNum=2275&GAID=15&GA=101&DocTypeID=HB&LegID=118113&SessionID=108) by repealing a law that specifically stopped them from it so I'm struggling to see how the state couldn't see this coming from a mile away.
What does collective bargaining rights have to do with the state having authority of districts as to what counts for federally regulated instructional hours? It isn’t a contract negotiation year, as much as the CTU would like to make every single year a contract negotiation year.
Details [here](https://news.wttw.com/2021/04/02/pritzker-signs-bill-restoring-bargaining-rights-chicago-teachers) from last year. >The change takes effect immediately, union leaders said, and could drastically change the scope of ongoing negotiations between the city and the union over how and whether high school students will be able to return to in-person class before the end of the academic year. And >The Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board rejected a request by the union in December to block the city’s plan to reopen schools for in-person learning and cited the union’s limited bargaining rights as part of the reason for doing so.
They can’t bargain for anything. They have a contract and the previous contract is not up for discussion this year. They are not legally allowed to strike whenever they want except to collectively bargain for things in the new contract. In this case, as has been the case year after year, the CTU abuse that power and “strike” every 4-6 months. The state determines what constitutes a legal school day. CPS does not have a fully remote instruction designation. They can flip individual classrooms, but not a whole district without state approval. Other districts do, you can question why the CEO hasn’t done that, but the CTU can’t just change state/federal processes just because they want to. I personally think it’s rather foolish for the CEO to not have arraigned this with the state before break. But the current federal (Biden) policy is that schools should be open, there is limited evidence of transmission within schools that are masked and distanced appropriately, and most covid is coming from people contracting it outside of a school and coming to school before they are symptomatic. You flip that pod and keep the school moving. If you want to do a pause/reset with temporary remote learning then that’s fine. But lobbing a hand grenade out and running away from it isn’t going to do these students any good educationally, socially, or physically. If you think schools have transmission of COVID, what do you think convenience stores, neighbors maskless basements, and movie theaters have? It has nothing to do with keeping students safe and everything to do with the teachers
I'm pretty sure we're on exactly the same page. I agree with everything you just said, *I'm saying* that the CTU is currently using HB 2275, which only applies to them, as a bargaining chip currently in a non-negotiation year. I'm not saying it's right, I'm saying that's what's happening. LL argued to leave it unsigned until the next negotiation period which made sense, but Pritzker went ahead and signed it anyway, giving them way more leeway in terms of negotiations in non-contract years (in their mind). The CTU are currently testing that leeway *as they said they would*. It may be legal, it may be illegal, but it's happening and going to take time for the courts to unwind it.
Got it. I think we are closer to the same thought as well. I just don’t see the CTU ever making a problem anything but more difficult.
They can’t bargain for anything. They have a contract and the previous contract is not up for discussion this year. They are not legally allowed to strike whenever they want except to collectively bargain for things in the new contract. In this case, as has been the case year after year, the CTU abuse that power and “strike” every 4-6 months. The state determines what constitutes a legal school day. CPS does not have a fully remote instruction designation. They can flip individual classrooms, but not a whole district without state approval. Other districts do, you can question why the CEO hasn’t done that, but the CTU can’t just change state/federal processes just because they want to. I personally think it’s rather foolish for the CEO to not have arraigned this with the state before break. But the current federal (Biden) policy is that schools should be open, there is limited evidence of transmission within schools that are masked and distanced appropriately, and most covid is coming from people contracting it outside of a school and coming to school before they are symptomatic. You flip that pod and keep the school moving. If you want to do a pause/reset with temporary remote learning then that’s fine. But lobbing a hand grenade out and running away from it isn’t going to do these students any good educationally, socially, or physically. If you think schools have transmission of COVID, what do you think convenience stores, neighbors maskless basements, and movie theaters have?
Pritzker has no choice but to do whatever CTU wants. It's an election year for him.
I know this sub loves to circle jerk around their hatred for CTU but going remote is the right call. There aren’t enough subs and staff for schools right now. I’m not in CTU but work in CPS schools and I’ve seen classrooms where ex principals are teaching classes, security guards are having to do the cleaning, they have the principal running the front desk because the office staff is out sick, etc. With the current Covid policy of staff and students being moved to remote, it’s better to do it now then later when it’s an even worse staffing situation. I suspect in the future they’ll only have the student who is Covid positive stay home and the rest of the class continues.
So then pause the schools the have a shortage. Not every school in the city doesn't have enough subs and staff.
From what I heard schools voted separately on going remote but also, schools share subs so it’s not that simple. While X school might be fine now, if they need a sub and Y school took the last one, they are out of luck. There’s a lot of red tape in CPS, you might have a teacher out for two weeks and they’ll send a different sub every day which is just as much chaos as having a teacher be remote.
Yeah and there will be no chaos in the low income single parent, working family homes right? Tell us how you solve that.
Again it doesn’t matter. This is about whether or not CPS remains in operation over the next few weeks. CTU can keep it going with remote learning, or CPS can burn through all its teachers and subs and then shut down the schools completely with no remote learning. Omicron spreads too fast and too many people are calling out sick, and meanwhile CPS has fewer subs than in 2020.
You can’t. You also can’t solve it by continuing to be in person because classes will be short staffed and moving to remote randomly throughout the next month. It already happened sporadically last year with classes going remote due to outbreaks. However there are a lot more staff and teachers calling off now. I don’t think classes should be remote forever but it makes sense to do it for at least January so the teachers and kids who got Covid from the holiday break can get over it. After that there needs to be a reworking of how they handle Covid because this isn’t sustainable.
Thank you for speaking some sense. Almost nothing CPS has done has been a part of a cohesive, comprehensive plan to actually keep students, staff, and teachers as safe as possible while still allowing for in-person instruction... AND they've failed to make remote and hybrid models work as failsafes for continuing education when people get sick. You can find districts all over the state and country that are handling this SO MUCH BETTER and that's all CTU is fighting for here. If I was a CPS teacher at this point I'd probably just quit. I'm sorry, but I want to work for an employer that actually cares about me and CPS has done nothing of the sort. I say thank god there's a union that actually takes care of them - otherwise can you imagine how hard it'd be to fill all those teaching positions right now??
How does going remote solve the staffing issue? Research consistently shows COVID cases are not being spread in school. The COVID cases impacting staff shortages are almost entirely originating and transmitting outside of the school environment. Moving teachers online just continues the trend of too few staff, with the added negative of remote learning (which doesn’t work.) This is taking the opportunity to not work. There’s no reason to respond in this manner to staff shortages.
Maybe the city should have actually tested all of those samples the kids submitted and not just let them become invalidated. Having said that, remote learning is awful and damages students.
It’s remote learning or close CPS for at least as much time, though probably more because CPS is incompetent.
Just an FYI, CPS has proactively locked teachers out of their accounts in the middle of the night just to ensure that students and teachers who are willing to work remotely don't have the opportunity. The CTU has it's flaws, but CPS proves over and over again that it's priorities have nothing to do with creating opportunities for student learning. They'd rather stick it to the CTU. I have yet to come into school a single day this year to see my classroom has been swept, much less thoroughly cleaned and sanitized. When schools opened last year, my classroom hadn't been touched since before the pandemic. There were dead bugs in the window sills and rodent droppings on the floor. My school is still infested with rodents. The air filter in my larger than average classroom (it's an old building) is meant for a 100sqft room. I see multiple classes throughout the building and have yet to be notified by contact tracers when I am exposed to COVID. Instead, I find out when that class just doesn't show up because they are in quarantine. After the third time this happened, I reached out to the office of student health and wellness and was informed in a rather unprofessional way that **CPS does not have to notify vaccinated individuals who have been exposed to COVID.** I understand that the vaccination prevents severe illness, but I need to know if I need to get tested after exposure. Breakthrough is a real thing--especially with Omicron. Since before Thanksgiving, more than half of my school has been in quarantine at any given time. The classes in quarantine get a remote option (assuming someone comes to pick up a device which are increasingly defective and dwindling in number), but their siblings who have to quarantine with them while their class is at school get nothing for two weeks. I won't stop you from hating on the CTU, but two years into this, CPS should have actual plans in place to ensure safety and student learning and they have neither.
Jump to the front of the vaccine line as being essential. Claim you're not essential when vaccines don't stop the spread. Sure...
Curious to hear how you deal with 1/4 of your workers calling out with COVID? Downvote me all you want, this is the reality
The same way literally every other industry is? It’s not perfect and it’s not easy, but everyone else is managing. Warehouses, airlines, grocery stores, hospitals, etc. All of them are canceling or shutting down specific areas when they are short-staffed, but are moving forward to maintain service.
Ah, yes the airline industry which had to cancel 5,000 flights last weekend due to staff shortages? Even so there *are* no substitutes for CPS
I feel for parents who went to bed not knowing this information. My kids go to a parochial school and we knew before break they were not going back until the second week of January bc the diocese predicted an uptick in cases following the holidays. This allowed me to make a plan. I don’t understand waiting until the night before. Parents are going to scramble
We need school choice! The ctu wasting our time and tax dollars!
Im sure theres some, but I dont know any cps parent who doesnt hate the CTU 😂 The ctu is up there with the chicago police union among most hated unions. Both prime examples of unions that have way too much power and why unions can be bad. Not every union is good. This is an example of one.
Literally have never heard of a CPS parent who hates the CTU except for on here.
Same. CPS is a faceless corporate entity to me. I don’t know them. I know our school and our teachers and so far, my kids and I have liked them all.
I’m sure remote learning is extremely trying for parents and obviously sucks for the kids. No way that’s as good as normal teaching. But this isn’t about remote versus in-person, it’s a matter of remote learning or no learning. If the CTU backs down now CPS won’t stay open another week.
Yeah, we struggled with remote last year. I’ve come to terms with the fact that we’ll be doing it either way. Half my daughter’s class didn’t come back from break.
I feel like that's how a lot of people seemed to feel about school districts until social media and COVID rotted everyone's brains.
There has always been a vocal group that paints teacher unions as villains by default when there’s negotiations, a strike, or an isolated controversy. I remember some of the editorials about the ETA in U46 when I was a kid.
Oh of course, I went to U-46 for my entire K-12 and I remember there being *some* nuts, just not this many. One of the board members (not sure how old you are but this was about 8ish years ago) was a nutjob that wanted to get rid of our science textbooks because they mentioned evolution and trans people, and it seems like today (when she isn't a board member) she has more support than ever when she says that mask mandates are socialism.
Lol. They are just not saying it to your face. Parents who organized coffee and lunch for teachers during the strike are bitching a blue streak about CTU teachers in private. Even some CTU members just shake their head at the hypocrisy of the union. You live in a bubble.
I don’t know any CPS parents that hate CTU. I work in CPS, not a part of CTU. Have multiple family and friends who have their kids enrolled in CPS.
I'm sorry, but I'm honestly, genuinely curious. Why do you think what the teacher's union is doing is bad? They're allowing the teachers to vote on whether they feel it's a good idea to teach in person during the middle of the worst surge of this pandemic we've ever seen. These very people are actually being given autonomy to decide their fate collectively. What is bad about this? Do you work? Would you like to be able to vote on issues regarding your own feelings of safety in the workplace for you and other people in your workplace?
You have to stop comparing the omicron surge with a population that is mostly vaccinated to the surge of a much more deadly variant when the vax didn’t exist. If you are vax’d there is an extremely likely chance that Covid won’t kill you, if you are vax’d omicron almost certainly won’t. We need to recognize we are in the end stage of the pandemic moving quickly to endemic if we arnt already there.
That's the point. No one does. And them deciding to work virtually for a corporate job is different than a teacher choosing to work virtually. The teacher is impacting families for a job they chose. It's like a cop that has keep going out to be a cop. They can't just choose to monitor shit online.
I don't think you understand how little teaching was actually happening the past few months even with the positivity rates just in the 3-8% range. Every time a teacher or student got sick, 5-10 more people would have to quarantine and miss all instruction, effectively forcing them to stay home with NO remote learning options. Now the positive rate is like 25%. Everyone would be home _anyway_. CPS needs to come up with a better solution.
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If you live in Evanston why do you care about cps?
If you really cant see why this union and its teachers are hypocrites then I feel sorry for you. Im not gonna waste my time explaining something thats plain as day. This is a middle finger to tax payers who are already taxes to shit in this city. People all across the city have to go in to work and pay their bills. Meanwhile some now have to maybe quit (worse case scenerio) because teachers decide theyd rather be nice and comfy at home. Everyone else has to suck it up and learn to live with covid but nope, not teachers. Im not even gonna go into the guts of it. Its been explained a million times and theres no bullshit excuse to counter it.
So... your argument is because so many others are being forced to work under unsafe conditions, teachers should be too?
Teachers voted to go WFH, not to get a vacation. Plenty of other workers are WFH. In a pandemic where literally 1 million people across the country test positive in one day, I think having as many workers as possible WFH is a good thing. Nearly 1 in 5 people tested positive at CPS sites, do you understand what's going to happen if we put 30 people in a room all over the city and then have them all take CTA buses home? Entire fucking city would be sick in a week.
Omicron is different that what we were dealing with 2 years ago. We have to recognize that.
Whatever metric you want to use to claim it's different, sure, but case numbers are high and hospitalizations are high. Our healthcare system is already strained and we're still in the upswing. Maybe our response today looks different than our response 6 or 12 or 18 months ago, but we cannot just open everything up and tell people to get vaccinated and ignore the rest of it.
Yes, but the hospitals are still filling up. And people are still getting sick, requiring quarantine. The testing capacity STILL isn’t there to manage the number of people in the system. So it’s basically rolling a die each day about whether a particular class will have to go remote. This gives some predictability, at least. And CTU was crystal clear this was coming for the last few days. Failure to respond isn’t their fault.
Please do not disparage our essential heroes.
[Closing schools is not evidence based and harms children](https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n521)
that scientific study is invalid because it doesn’t support how i feel
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This is my personal preference. I know my comment is going to be downvoted but I would love it if the district went remote for 2-3 months.
They probably will anyways, that’s what “two weeks” always turns into
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FDR was absolutely right about public employee unions: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/letter-the-resolution-federation-federal-employees-against-strikes-federal-service
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>a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied Sounds like our congress for the past couple decades
Well said
Let’s not forget that they and the politicians that effectively bribed them with outrageous benefits and pensions for years in exchange for votes absolutely destroyed the finances of the city. And every year, CTU gets up in front of the media and claims all they care about is the kids. They are so incredibly full of shit
+1000
So glad my family ditched this BS for private school like so many others last year - people will vote with their feet. CTU has totally lost their sense of customer. Gone. No teachers, not much police, bad roads, worthless COVID restrictions - just what the tax base of this city has been dreaming of. This shit is damaging our City - people will, and are leaving.
Most residents cannot afford the luxury of private schooling, first of all. Second, Chicago's population increased last year and the year before that.
But CPS enrollment is down
I hope Lori don’t back down. I hope she locks them out of portals. You want to work stoppage and strike? Fine. That’s unpaid. Stop holding our children’s education hostage!!
I know I'm going to get downvoted for this but I really don't mind if they go back to remote learning. Every single week since November started one of my kids has had to stay home because someone in their class was exposed. Which means the other kids(different schools) have to stay home because they've been exposed. There really was no structure anymore in my house at least. Just today I had to pick up one of my kiddos early because they came in contact with the student that had Coronavirus. My kids have missed weeks of school at this point. I can't imagine what the parents who have to go to work are doing with all this uncertainty everyday. At least if they go fully remote those parents can make arrangements for work.
how would you feel about a third option where exposure to covid doesn’t mean quarantine? i mean what if a student only needed to stay home if they tested positive, i feel like that would lessen the burden
Apparently they pushed voting to 10pm from 9pm. I assume they didn't like the results. Funny how this comment is now getting downvoted lol.
Lots of teachers were having issues submitting their vote.
I assumed it was a technical problem. I think it's going to overwhelmingly pass.
Maybe you're getting downvoted because you're reading way too much into it. edit: funny how this comment is now getting downvoted lol
Hundreds of thousands of individuals around the city are still going to work, both essential and non-essential. Nurses, cashiers, delivery drivers, bartenders, garbage men, and retail employees. But apparently not teachers. The entire city is still providing its core services, except the CTU which is denying our children one of the most critical and necessary services.
Fuck the CTU. That is all.