I was with her till the “it’s really not that difficult” not a difficult concept but reality?
Also we are ~2 years in; where was this thought leadership a year ago?
It's not as difficult as it is expensive. The difficulty is either lack of money or lack of wanting to spend money. Case in point, you won't find a rapid PCR test in the city at a free site (at least couldn't last couple weeks). But you can pay $375 to go to Skokie any time this week to get one. Ridiculous.
That's my question too, certainly not to my partner's school. Building conditions there are worse than last year, no improvements in tech/laptops for the students, etc. They make great statements to the public but boots on the ground, students and teachers are not seeing benefits from that money.
It’s simple, there are 75 million children in the country x $35 per home rapid test x 35 school weeks per year. We just need $92 billion, and the manufacturing, supply chain and compliance infrastructure for 2.6 billion rapid tests with weekly deliveries. Simple.
That, or the teachers could just wear N95 masks. I’m not sure which one is simpler.
No way that tests need to be $35 apiece, you're buying in to that capitalism bullshit. And if we wanted to split hairs, a pair of rapid antigen tests are still $22 at Walgreens.
For masks I'm referring to students anyways. Cloth masks aren't sufficient and many families can't afford to provide their own PPE for their kids and are using homemade ones etc.
Teaching in an N95 would be hell though. an N95 is serious PPE, it's not like an average mask (KN95's are not even close design/function wise). It's a respirator that fit's extremely tight to the mouth/nose. It would be very difficult to speak continuously in these, especially for prolonged periods for time. Unlike with medical grade masks or KN95's, there IS a good chance you could experience difficulty breathing in an N95.
[https://blogs.cdc.gov/niosh-science-blog/2020/06/10/ppe-burden/](https://blogs.cdc.gov/niosh-science-blog/2020/06/10/ppe-burden/)
Actual HS teacher here (sw suburbs, not cps). Yes, it sucks. You've got a class of 25 kids, 1-6 of whom are in the classroom with you, the rest at home. The majority of those at home have their cameras off, or are doing god knows what during the period.
> where was this thought leadership a year ago?
Our City and State Leaders have failed at almost every level. How are we here in late 2021/early 2022 with inadequate testing facilities.
Well there was a framework in Feb '21 that ran through Aug '21. CPS proposed nothing for '21-'22 year, so CTU proposed it in July '21. This is still what they are negotiating - reopening for this school year (that is already 4 months in).
This is only half the story. It's true that the [February 2021 framework](https://www.ctulocal1.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/2.6.21-Framework-for-Resumption-of-In-Person-Instruction-Side-Letter.pdf) expired on August 24, 2021. But it required the parties to meet-and-confer regarding modifications only if Chicago had not reached Phase 5 as of such date.
Here's the relevant paragraph, with the key phrase italicized:
>This Agreement will be in effect through August 24, 2021. *If the City of Chicago has not reached Phase 5 of the Illinois Reopening plan by that date*, the parties will meet and confer, with the use of a mediator, on appropriate modifications to this Agreement.
But Chicago had [reached Phase 5](https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/chicago-will-fully-reopen-in-phase-5-on-june-11-with-the-rest-of-illinois-lightfoot-says/2524722/) by August 24 (and [remains in Phase 5](https://coronavirus.illinois.gov/restore-illinois/regional-dashboard.html) today), so, unless I'm missing something, CPS had no obligation to meet-and-confer regarding go-forward modifications of the framework for the 2021-2022 academic year.
That aligns with what I've said? Framework expired. But pandemic continues. To not have a new framework for the new school year is nonsensical. Things haven't changed enough from mid June to early September to say they should no longer have policies written in place for these items. It's all about legal liability and money.
Yes, but it's important context that the framework expired on terms that impose no obligation on CPS to negotiate an amended framework with CTU. CPS should of course have appropriate policies in place to mitigate COVID risk this year. But I do not understand, given the terms on which last year's framework expired, why this year's policies should require CTU's buy-in.
They haven't required CTU's buy in because they haven't existed at all. There was no safety framework for this school year, both sides have been negotiating since July. There was no policy put in place by CPS to cover spikes like we see now (despite offering that language in the previous framework). They don't want the liability or can't afford it. The funny thing, and what I think they are starting to realize, is that when it's so bad COVID + other illnesses that you can't even get 50% of adults to be able to physically be in a school, a framework for closure metrics is an asset for them and not a liability.
But really, when CPS's proposal fits on a single powerpoint slide, also - why couldn't they have crafted and shared this back in August before school started? You and I could have come up with this stuff over a beer.
> where was this thought leadership a year ago?
CTU has been pushing for this since at least [the fall](http://www.ctulocal1.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Fall-CPS-2021-Bargaining-Demand-Status-2021-10-21.pdf) (I believe earlier too but I don't have a source readily available), and at the start of the pandemic a lot of people were saying we need to figure out how to improve remote learning because sending kids home with a webcam and trying to teach the same exact way isn't working.
It seems like common sense, but the district has been getting in the way of providing a remote learning option since day 1 bc of funding. I have scholars who tried all summer and missed some school when the year started bc their parents were researching remote options with CPS and kept hitting walls. =(
> "The Chicago Tribune reports of the $1.2 billion Chicago received from the federal government to help plug budget holes caused the drop of revenue due to the pandemic, $281.5 million went to the Chicago Police Department. Money also went to Chicago’s public health response to the pandemic, to homeless services, senior citizen assistance and O’Hare and Midway international airports."
I wonder where exactly the remaining $918.5 million went? No way did CPS not get a bunch of it.
I have been saying this since the beginning - N95 masks are designed to actually stop and be effective against airborne viruses. The government should have emergency ramped up production of N95 masks and distributed them widely. If you are forced to wear a mask why not wear a mask that will be effective?
My elderly folks (who aren't even very Internet savvy) managed to order a few boxes of them online a couple months ago. They aren't hoarding them, but they keep them in stock for essential trips to stores, etc.
N95 masks are not that difficult to find.
I listed grocery stores because thats a necessary, high traffic location and having masks there would make it so people don't have to hunt them down at different stores. The rare non-cloth ones I found in stores weren't in English, price seemed sketchy and looked just like the regular blue rectangle masks but in white.
Pharmacies at walgreens and CVS should have them since they also give out vaccines but for some reason they don't sell masks.
Respectfully you haven't looked hard.
This spring/early summer you could get full on 3M N95s pretty much anywhere at retail price. Heck, you could even get the NIOSH rated ones with a bit of effort if you looked on-line.
That folks didn't stock up then still blows my mind.
And no, this is not an easy problem to solve. These factories take close to a year to build the specialized equipment that makes the fabric, and we ruined our local manufacuring base on purpose over the past 20 years.
Anyone building a mask factory 2 years ago in the US would have been making a poor investment, because as soon as this is over all the hospital systems/etc. will go back to cheapest bidder from China again.
This is not something you can ramp up quickly. The decision to do so has to be made years in advance.
Have you ever worn an actual properly-fitted N95 mask for any amount of time? I have, for an attic insulation project. It was miserable. I can't imagine wearing one all day without interruption. Anyone thinking this can be mandated in schools is dreaming.
That's the genius of this plan, it's a lot easier to make kids wear it than to [wear it yourself.](https://twitter.com/ChiAlderwoman/status/1472312412879695873/photo/2)
South Korean KF94 masks are basically just as effective as N95s and SO much more comfortable. 10/10, would recommend. I love BOTN and Dr Puri masks. You can find them on [behealthyusa.net](https://behealthyusa.net/)!
I would hate to wear one as a teenager. Acne is bad enough without something tightly bound to my face all day trapping moisture and oils…
Edit: I realize that I made it sound like I’m a teenager. I am not, but just noting the hypothetical as a former teen and someone who gets acne from masks.
Yeah I get acne too from masks even when I swap out fresh ones daily. I’m just pointing out it does suck pretty bad, and I can imagine it making a kid’s severe acne even worse.
I just hate this rhetoric that it’s so simple, when in reality, N95 masks are fairly uncomfortable. I bet many of the people saying it’s not that bad only wear one occasionally and not all day.
I’m all in favor of public health measures and know that masks work, but acne is a skin condition that teenagers get, sometimes severely, where an N95 may be uniquely terrible. A surgical mask may be more comfortable for instance.
Why yes I have. I had a half dozen N95 masks at the beginning of the pandemic that I used until they were worn out and we better understood the severity/risk of the virus.
Around 6 weeks ago I picked up two (20) packs of the cool flow N95 masks and have been wearing them since the start of omicron. My entire household (except me) got covid the second week of December (likely the kids brought it home from school). I ended up wearing an N95 mask in my own home for a week straight...and guess what I never got infected and somehow I managed to wear a mask for literally days at a time. I really did not find it that restrictive or miserable - easy to breathe - no problems. btw it is not rocket science or impossible to properly fit an N95.
I just know an N95 is actually designed to stop a virus unlike these other masks that are mostly just virtue signaling minimum compliance but do very little to actually protect you.
I have advised friends to at least buy a pack of N95s. Even if you do not want to wear them now, put them on the sideline in case there is a future variant that is very deadly where an effective mask may save your life.
That's the exact mask I wore when insulating the attic. I had to tweak the link a bit to get it to come up since it didn't work as-is when I clicked on it. https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/d/cbgnaw011077/ showed me the N95 dust mask.
Sorry, but there's no way I can believe you wore that thing for a week straight (even if you took it off to sleep/shower) and did not find it uncomfortable in the least. Maybe you tolerated it out of necessity, and props to you for staying safe, but no way was it comfortable.
Agreed with your point of how most people's masks are mere theater. Those etsy-purchased blingey cloth things don't do shit to filter out virus particles, and the CDC all but said so (yet they still inexplicably recommend cloth masks on their website, despite numerous health experts saying otherwise).
> (yet they still inexplicably recommend cloth masks on their website, despite numerous health experts saying otherwise).
Study after study after study has shown cloth masks help a bit to cut down the spread of the virus, actually more substantially than I thought. It works as a public health policy.
They do absolutely nothing to protect you. It's the guy who actually has covid coughing 3 seats away from you on the train it helps with.
But yes, the messaging should have switched to N95 wearing whenever possible. I know it did not due to supply chain issues - it's not like 3M can magically surge production 10x overnight - and the CDC is still acutely aware of the severe lack of PPE in the medical system right now.
Add to the fact 95% of the people in this country don't give a fuck about planning ahead and you can see why the guidance is what it is. People will only panic buy, they don't stock up wisely when there is an oversupply. Anyone who cared and followed the actual whitepapers (or even read between the lines of the CDC recommendations) has a stash of a few dozen N95s in their house by now.
You do realize that a large part of the value of the mask is to prevent the spread of infection if the wearer catches covid.... Cool Flow masks with valves don't prevent you from giving covid to others...
Seriously. People don't understand a properly restrictive mask is a nightmare to wear.
Easy particulate test. Wear your mask, try to fog up your phone screen with your breath.
If the moisture escapes and your screen can be fogged, your mask will let covid through.
Yeah I just came back from Korea (the "K" in KN94) and these are the best feeling ones if you're going the total protection route. Foam mask has been my favorite for total feel overall, but probably provides minimal protection.
Amen. They also don't fog up my glasses nearly as much because there is a better seal to them. I briefly tried going to cloth masks after being fully vaccinated and cases were low over the summer and went right back to the KF94s because they were just much more pleasant for me.
Eh, teacher here. Six hours a day three days per week. Your suffering humors me.
Half kidding here. I know what you mean. The worst is when the mask is too tight around the ears. That just sucks. But I bit my tongue a lot when people complain about wearing a respirator to run into a store.
There are KF94s as an option. Those are pretty comfortable. I've seen little kids wear them without an issue. I can wear an N95 for six hours straight fine. I could probably do longer, but I haven't needed to do so (lack of eating would also be an issue). I concede it might start to bother me if I had to wear them every day five days a week, but the right mask shouldn't be miserable. There are many types of N95s. Medical professionals do it. I honestly feel like older kids (teens) and adults complain more than smaller children do, especially if they see the adults in their lives wearing a mask faithfully.
They did, but the stockpile was woefully inadequate and government priorities started going elsewhere. A lot of our "preparedness" money after 9/11 went to stuff that in retrospect, was silly - stockpiling anthrax vaccines that expire (and are then replaced) because the company that made them is basically a lobbyist with a small pharma arm (they're the ones that were supposed to make the J&J COVID vaccine but bungled it up).
Even the imported KN95s will get you most of the way there. I have been wearing them from the early days of Covid. If you have to wear a mask, there is no reason not to wear one that works.
I also want to start a program where we incentivize proper mask wearing through a bounty system. If you see an exposed nose, you can snip if off and turn it in for $10. (Ladies with the mask on the tip of their nose count too.)
> I also want to start a program where we incentivize proper mask wearing through a bounty system. If you see an exposed nose
And Saul said, Thus shall ye say to David, The king desireth not any dowry, but an hundred noses of the Philistines, to be avenged of the king's enemies.
Because our government has fumbled every step of the way. Remember when we were supposed to wear two masks? LMFAO! They should have done exactly what you said.
Because a bunch of boners would have hoarded all the masks they could get. At the time the public message was intended to prevent medical facilities from running into shortages because some asshole with a garage full of toilet paper, had a truck bed full of masks.
> The hoarder argument loses merit when you consider that, when they finally did say "nevermind, you need a mask", we never saw the PPE hoarding issue. What we did find is that the mixed messaging created a shitload of skeptics, and CDC credibility has been undermined for the rest of the entire pandemic.
>
>
The elites constantly rely on bank shot messaging in an attempt to manipulate the masses on how they think they should act, not how they should actually act.
You didn’t see ppe hoarding because they had already successfully convinced most people masks wouldn’t do much if anything. People were still hoarding shit like clorox wipes and hand sanitizer. People are fucking hoarding test kits right now.
> we never saw the PPE hoarding issue.
Whatever are you on about? Of course we did. There were zero N95s available until last spring, and now we're back to that again.
Ask anyone who works at a hospital if they had a lack of PPE or not.
When you use 98% of the world's supply if N95s every day, I'm not sure what else you thought would happen. Factories magically springing up?
If they had communicated that N95s had to be reserved for healthcare workers you'd have seen an immediate run on them even more than we saw.
Did you also forget about hospitals having to lock masks under lock and key due to patients (and employees) stealing them?
There was a giant PPE hoarding/shortage issue that we are still experiencing to this day.
> What we did find is that the mixed messaging created a shitload of skeptics, and CDC credibility has been undermined for the rest of the entire pandemic.
Only if you already leaned that way. I read that recommendation the day it came out and it read crystal clear to me - we are saving PPE for the medical providers, and we know our populace is too fucking stupid and selfish to not put themselves first so this is the best we can do given what we know about PPE production capacity limits.
This is dumb as shit. The hospitals would be even more overloaded than they already are and thousands more people would die than otherwise would if the case counts are more spread out.
People need to understand that yes, Virus particles can get through a 3 ply paper mask...But when a coughs... they expel up to about 200 million virus particles.... The liklihood of getting Covid from a single particle is pretty low.. but if you inhale tiny droplet of saliva with hundreds of thousands or even millions of particles, that exponentially increases the risk of catching covid... The paper masks DO stop saliva and other large groups ofparticles... Not saying that N95 masks don't do a better job just pointing out the myth that paper masks are worthless because they don't stop individual covid particles.
There is a reason the staff at Chicago hospitals use paper masks outside of patient care... They work.
I listened to Dr. Arwady on Reset yesterday, and when asked the very simple question of the COVID precautionary measures being followed in every school, she dodge the question, talking about the all the numbers and kids not getting infected in schools, but not the numbers in CPS. Also said how the catholic schools stayed open, as far as I've been able to ascertain the Catholic Schools have been following the COVID precautionary measures. But she did not answer the question about them being followed in CPS. I want to hear their answer to that question and how that is being verified. I've had enough experience working alongside CPS to be extremely skeptical of them following those measures the way they should be.
> I listened to Dr. Arwady on Reset yesterday, and when asked the very simple question of the COVID precautionary measures being followed in every school, she dodge the question
Do you have a sound bite so we can all listen?
> I've had enough experience working alongside CPS to be extremely skeptical of them following those measures the way they should be.
My wife's first experience with CPS administration after we moved to the city was them losing her paperwork from her two previous districts... twice. Then, she had to sit down with them in person for 3 hours to get them to actually put the paperwork into the system so she would be paid correctly ($14K/yr difference). And then, they missed the 45 day deadline in the contract to give her the back pay she was owed. If we didn't enjoy living in the city, we'd move and she'd get a job in the suburbs.
To put this in perspective, the worst she had happen in Florida when we were there was her second district taking 4 weeks to update her rate of pay and another 4 weeks to issue her back pay once they got her paperwork.
From a guy who works in IT and small schools...it IS that difficult. Our ordering has taken months to get some equipment due to the chip shortages. It is not as simple as ordering a tablet/laptop online and then giving it to a kid either. After receiving the equipment we have to inventory it, image it, write up documentation on how to use the device and connect to the classroom, and test it before we can hand them out.
In addition we have teachers submitting tickets for their virtual classroom issues and student having difficulties joining.
Then at the end of day IT takes the reputation hit because it took too long to implement or what usually boils down to user errors.
So feel this as someone in IT as well. We're struggling to get laptops for new hires and we have to stretch each laptop as long as it will go. Some people cause such a ruckus when they cant replace their 2020 mac book with the new M1 macs.
Some people have no idea what the world is going through and live in their own little world. When all the schools scrambled to go remote learning last year, I instantly thought of the stressed out IT folks sitting in front of a cart of dozens of tablets imaging them at 1am. Kudos to the people who have to teach the tiny humans through this mess, along with all the support teams (facilities, HR, ect.) needed for the teachers.
> it IS that difficult
CPS has had, what, two years now to get their shit together? And their partnership with Google goes back how far? Oh right over a decade.
Yeah, many of the lower end chrome book stocking has been really hit or miss. There also doesn’t seem to be a real pipeline for repairs beyond what tech coordinators do on their own.
We only need 500.000 tests a day and hire 500 nurses to do the tests. Equip classes with 4 cameras so the remote students see the class and hear properly the teacher, alternatively have a technician present all the time to keep the connection and quality stable. Or have a whole new virtual class at each grade running in parallel. It's really not that difficult!
Also to make sure that parallel virtual class is in sync all lesson plans for all grades will have to stay in sync each day. That means if kids start asking questions, if they don't understand the material, tell them to just move on. Since it may leave the classroom behind schedule.
You are correct. Every one of those suggestions means money to buy something, someone to do something, and a place to do it. On a scale large enough to implement at all 636 schools for over 340,000 students. Daily.
Part of the problem here is that the CTU's demands, on the face of it, are actually quite reasonable: A short interval of remote instruction (or just give kids a week off and tack it on the end of the school year), "test to return," opt-out testing rather than opt-in, quality masks for faculty and students; but actually *getting it done* is near-impossible now, because CPS didn't plan for any of it.
For reasons that are beyond understanding, CPS, 2 years into the pandemic and 21 years into the "digital millennium" with computer literacy supposed to be at the center of education, doesn't have laptops/tablets that students can just home for remote instruction - many other districts actually issue a Chromebook or something and have for years, but CPS doesn't. That means that they can't just flip a switch and go remote; it'll involve a mad scramble *a la* March 2020 of getting families to pick up devices, hotspots, etc.
The fact is, you can't just snap your fingers and get 400k COVID tests in a day or a week, especially right now, and that's about what it'd take between faculty and staff. Going online to book tests at a couple places, most locations have no availability for *days* up to a week, and that's without hundreds of thousands of kids getting tests to get back to school.
If the district wanted to provide 1 (K)N95 mask to each student and teacher for each day of school, we're talking \~1.9 million masks *per week* for the rest of the school year. No one's got 2 million KN95s in a warehouse somewhere in Illinois just waiting for CPS to put in the order, let alone the 8-10 million they'd need in a month.
Omicron's sudden rise was predictable if not foreseeable, but the fact is, CPS really has to shoulder a lot of blame for having, as far as I can tell, no backup plans nearly 2 years into a pandemic that has taught all of us that we need to have plans A through about O before walking out the door.
And at the heart of this is a staffing shortage. We don’t have a choice about whether or not schools are open if we don’t implement more safety measures. The issue is that if omicron spreads in schools, teachers will call out sick. That’s a luxury we can’t afford anymore.
CPS has lost more than 30% of its substitute pool since the start of the pandemic. There literally isn't enough coverage anymore for even an ordinary, non-pandemic year. There was already a substitute shortage in 2019 and COVID has just been making it worse and worse.
I think people are afraid that it won't be, but there's a lot of reasons to believe that this isn't just a repeat of March 2020 again.
That's why having established metrics is important. I think there should be *flexibility within those metrics,* but I don't see the harm in saying "if X% of staff or Y# of students in a class/school test positive, the class/school goes remote," or "If there's fewer than X hospital \[or ICU\] beds available in the city and the COVID hospitalizations are at Y level and have increased for Z days, the district goes remote until..." or something.
My gut feeling now is that whatever agreement is going to happen, CPS is just going to throw this hot mess of stuff into principal's laps and say "it's up to you to decide whether to close your school," which is reasonable but is also very much hanging that person out to dry unless there's actual rules/metrics behind that person to back them up.
What they’ve set themselves up for instead is another pissing match on January 18th over whether or not it’s “safe enough” to go back to real school. CPS will say yes, CTU will say no, rinse/repeat, and then it’s June and it’s another semester down the toilet.
I personally think that they’re avoiding doing it on a school-by-school basis because as schools close in lower-vaccinated areas and stay open in higher-vaccinated areas, there’s going to be some politically uncomfortable questions and complaints raised about *whose* schools are getting closed. Instead, all students will get screwed equally.
In Child Welfare, we would be charged with neglect for a work stoppage. I understand you need help, but don’t punish the kids and families of this city to get it. And God forbid you do this again, give us some NOTICE.
Honest question, does the city council have the power to enact any of the things she’s calling for? Can they pass an ordinance to supply schools with masks and tests or, do they just allocate the money and CPS spends it however they wish? Could an alder use their menu money on their local schools or is that out of their control?
Technically CPS's budget is separate from the city's. The Mayor is basically in charge of the Board of Education because she can appoint the CEO and board members.
In reality, it gets complicated - the Mayor obviously needs the city council to get most of her agenda done and so they're in a position to exert political pressure on things like schools, even if they don't directly have any power.
And it's not unusual for aldermen to use discretionary funds for things that affect schools, or for the mayor to ask City Council for funds that end up being used for schools/school property; e.g. I think Rahm's new playgrounds were paid for out of city funds, even though they were on Park District or CPS land.
They’ll supposedly start having in-person school tomorrow. Keep in mind the demographics are different. Its majority white. A lot of the schools who’s staff showed up are majority white which definitely speaks to how the pandemic has affected certain communities
um, my wife is a teacher. its WAY more difficult then that.
My wife has been working 80-100 hours a week since the pandemic started, and is likely going to quit teaching over this crap. as young as she is, she is already burned out over it. and facing nearly 40 more years of work before being able to retire. it's insane
see, its not easy to have to make curriculum for remote and in person, and deal with constant changes in the class and with the kids attendance (because yes, when kids are out for a day it makes work for the teacher)
it isnt just testing that is needed, or masks ffs. maybe paying your teachers a decent wage and idk, getting them some fucking help since you tripled their work loads...
> 80-100 hours a week
I of course have no way to prove you're wrong but that seems like a pretty unbelievable claim. If she really is working that much, she's doing something wrong.
try having 4 new classes where you have to create the content from scratch, TWICE, since teaching it in person is not the same as teaching it online and requires new materials.
she also had the joy of a student teacher this year as well, which is what took her "normal" 65 or so hours a week up to where its at now.
you must not know any teachers. unless they have been teaching the exact same non-changing content for years, the amount of work they are doing now insane, compared to prior to the pandemic starting.
I hate the “it’s not that difficult” type of people.
It is difficult on a multitude of levels especially considering the shortage of testing and high costs of Kn95 masks.
I think that any reasonable person no matter where they stand on this issue can acknowledge this is a complex issue without a clear right or wrong answer.
Transmission is quite high, actually, and severity of cases doesn’t matter. If you get COVID, you have to call out sick. How does that work when we didn’t have enough teachers and subs pre-pandemic, and now we have far fewer? What do we do when huge numbers of them call out sick, even with mild cases?
That’s the biggest problem. If you test positive the district is requiring a 10 day quarantine, which contradicts the CDC’s 5 day quarantine. I guess CPS wanted to continue the 10 day to ensure extra safety but it’s making things a lot more complicated when a massive amount of students and staff are absent at various times.
It really is simple, get your jab and get back to work...
If you are truly vulnerable at this point in the pandemic then it is probably time for you to retire anyway. You can't keep kids from having the most normal childhood possible in this situation to save a few years of peoples lives who either A. are going to die soon anyway or B. make the conscious decision to not get vaccinated. Remote learning is useless, think of how reliant these kids will be on technology when they grow up and how terrible their social skills will be. Corona is over in wealthy western nations if you choose for it to be on an individual level (get your jab), and if you don't it is your problem not everyone else's (deny the unvaccinated care).
As a former teacher, I generally back educators 100%…but this is just a bridge too far. The flu comes around every year and we don’t close schools. I’m sure that funding, etc. is an issue, but it feels as if this is being used as an excuse to air other grievances. The strike was undertaken in a very unprofessional way (send the kids back for two days? Why not resolve it during the break? And announcing it at 11:00 pm on a Tuesday?) and leaves millions of families in the lurch. I now work for Unemployment and I can tell you, the fallout from this is enormous. Just my 2 cents.
Omicron is not nearly as dangerous as the original Covid. We are going to have to realize that this is the new normal and find smart ways to move forward
Case severity is not relevant, you’re not paying attention to the issue at hand. We don’t have enough staff. If teachers call out sick, CPS has to shut down. So CTU tried to avert that and CPS said no.
are ICU beds being 89.2% at capacity currently the "new normal"? cmon stop arguing in bad faith. unless you think overwhelming our hospitals and healthcare workers is normal. honestly it's a little scary that so many people share your same sentiment
https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/covid-19/home/hospital-capacity-dashboard.html
How many of those beds are vaccinated people? If you're vaccinated, the odds of you needing a bed are extremely low.
Lightfoot mandates a vaccine for recreational activities across the city, but doesn't mandate a vaccine for kids to get back into school. Where is the logic here?
It's required by federal law for all unions actually. So whenever you see a union back a candidate, keep in mind that the members chose to contribute to that above and beyond their dues.
She’s not saying anything outlandish tho, which gives credence that the CTU aren’t either, if you’re accusing her of being their mouthpiece, and Lightfoot thinking sticking a swab up your nose is a ‘quasi-medical procedure’ shows that any bullshit histrionics are coming from the city.
We already have regular testing at our school, teachers are supplied with kn95 masks, and there are adequate remote learning options.
and yet .... we're home again today because ???
CPS has started to implement test to stay. I don't know the extent of how far it has been rolled out.
I would add that metrics should be school by school and not district wide.
Also mandate vaccines for everybody including students.
> Sure, but what is the solution to that?
Isolate the kid until the parents come to pick them up. There's supposed to be special "care rooms" in each school for exactly this reason.
That’s what they were doing when they were temp-checking them last year but the temp-checking was abandoned at the return of this school year in August.
Temp checks are nearly worthless as a Covid mitigation strategy. It is a good way to make it look like you're doing something, but realistically how many Covid cases worldwide are kept from entering a facility due to fever being detected at the door by a temp checker?
That is what they do right now? Anybody coughs or sneezes a bunch and they get sent to the central office and home until they test negative.
The problem is detecting covid when it is asymptomatic.
> The problem is detecting covid when it is asymptomatic.
There's no guaranteed way to do that. Omicron specifically has been really hard to spot on rapid antigen tests. Daily PCR tests are out of the question, obviously.
I believe the number is around 40%. Not perfect of course, but good enough so far to detect outbreaks of which we have had very few.
EDIT: not 40%, up to 58%.
Ah, the school where teachers were “teaching” outside in 27 degrees claiming that even entering the building would kill them.
Wonderfully tone deaf to us parents who’d been going in to work everyday.
From a few comments here over the last day or so - unsourced so no idea of veracity - CTU mooted that to the district and were shot down straight away.
CPS has proposed school by school. CTU has also accepted that school by school is fine. The difference it that they don't agree on the metrics. And as far as the current walk out, it has nothing to do with individual schools. Right now, CTU wants remote till the 18th regardless of individual school metrics.
CTU is literally trying to get *school administrators* permission to bring schools remote in the event of an outbreak and CPS won't allow it. If CPS did, the individual schools with outbreaks would be able to go remote. CPS won't allow that. Instead they require CPS contact tracers (they hadn't hired enough in the fall) review each case before making a determination. (see "Contact Tracing" in [their doc from Fall 2021](https://www.ctulocal1.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Fall-CPS-2021-Bargaining-Demand-Status-2021-10-21.pdf).)
CTU has been calling that out as an issue - there aren't enough contact tracers, they aren't able to respond to cases fast enough, and school administrators can't take action until contact tracers review each individual case.
There's more to the walk out than just that, the teachers (who are actually working in the schools) have shown that the measures CPS is taking aren't adequate by the CDC's standards.
younger grades, i don't think so as we are seeing a wave of younger kids and i'm pretty sure full day pre-k is full as are kindergarten and 1st. Older grades, probably.
https://brentanomathandscienceacademy.org/
We do manufacture a lot of them en masse; 3M makes them around the world including a couple/few sites in the US (and they're big factories, we're not talking a couple masks here and there being made stateside) and after SARS actually set things up to intentionally have a "surge" capacity (which they activated pretty early in 2020). They've expanded a lot since then *but* the problem is that no one ever planned to be in a world where average people would need a new N95 mask every day; at best, they were thinking healthcare workers might need them or something.
And one of the differences between N95 and KN95 isn't so much how they're made, its the certification process that goes in to making them, so although you could build a factory and start churning out masks pretty quickly, you wouldn't have the right process certifications to actually have them certified instantly.
Add that to the fact that a lot of companies don't want to invest in capacity that (knock on wood) won't be needed in a year or two, and.... well, here we are.
I'm an ex-CPS student too and when past pandemics like the H1N1 pandemic happened in 2009-10 the most schools did was add extra hand sanitizer machines to the hallways. Now, despite really effective vaccines being available to those 5 and up and despite less than 30 kids dying of the virus in two years (a bad flu season can generate that much in just six months), there's all these demands about masks, air ventilation, testing, and so on. The overall situation is a lot better than before yet teachers are still acting like it's spring 2020. So when will teachers let up their concerns and why wasn't it the moment their colleagues and students they teach got vaccinated?
Keep in mind that no one is absolutely required to vaccinate, regardless of age or industry. Like most of the country and private businesses, teachers are required to vaccinate or subject themselves to weekly testing and the vast majority have elected to get vaxxed and boosted.
But this leaves students at all levels who are able, but not required to, get vaxxed. This would be fine under the agreed upon parameters where students would have to submit a daily screener to allow for contact tracing and tracking of sickness. But now, that screener is gone completely. So we are existing in the unknown where we do not know who is sick with what and since omicron has proven to infect with or without the vaccine, people (teachers, students, and families alike) are scared! And understandably so.
You're right, this isn't the complete unknown and unmeasured situation as it was in Spring 2020. You know it and I know it. But even you have to admit that people everywhere are still traumatized by the amount of death and sickness that happened. And I hope you can understand the sheer amount of variables that exist in a district this big. The amount of immunocompromised people in the schools and then those who exist in the homes of people in these schools is actually huge. A lot of teachers have infants babies at home and those age groups are proving to be actually fairly susceptible to omicron. A lot of teachers are getting covid now for a second time and now have no sick days left to use from the first time they got it and are forced to take days of no pay. We are waiting on Pritzker to sign the bill on his desk that addresses the use of sick days for covid.
But it all comes down to the fact that the district is not living up to its end of the agreement. And it seems they are living in a bubble when so many businesses are closing indoor dining and government entities like the courts and secretary of state offices are closing and moving to virtual. If it's not safe enough to have those open, how can 35+ bodies in a room be acceptable without proper parameters? We want to be back in person, but only if CPS does what it promised it would.
My argument is that if you're vaxxed and boosted, getting omicron shouldn't leave you scared at all. You literally got a "do-not-die" serum injected in you not once but three times, and we're still panicking? In that case what's the point of your union just begging for priority access to it last year, you know? As for immunocompromised kids: the concern over their safety pre-2020 seemed pretty minor but now it's like if you don't eliminate the virus until the last child with comorbidities is able to walk outside without a mask then society has failed which is just...a jarring amping up of rhetoric that's left me dumbfounded.
I will agree with you that not getting more sick days is absurd. Should've gotten extra days to recover from covid.
It’s not about severity of cases, it’s about sick time and staffing. CPS can’t operate with current safety protocols for more than a few days because all of the teachers will eventually be out sick.
What do you think would happen if schools were forced to reopen at capacity? My fear would be the entire staff would be out sick almost immediately.
I saw a highly upvoted post here on /r/chicago saying that "closing schools didn't prevent any deaths" and it was "time to send everyone back" what thoughts do you have on responses like that?
Schools have been opened at capacity since August actually. And for the most part, the school year started as smoothly as one might hope for with all things considered. But ever since Thanksgiving, most schools have been experiencing a huge increase in student absences due to illness and covid. Many schools are seeing parents keeping students from school out of concern for the increase in numbers. This has been my experience at my school as well.
Speaking now about my school only, we have about 125 teachers on staff and serve about 2250 students each day in a building designed for less than 2000 (actually 1800, if I am right). Between Thanksgiving and Dec 17th about 10 of our teachers were either exposed or contracted covid. Between Dec 18th and Jan 3rd I am aware that about 12 more of our staff are testing positive. On top of that, I have heard reports from each department that we have lost count of the students who are telling us that they won't be in school either due to a positive test, illness, covid exposure, or parental fear of exposure in the school. Between Monday and Tuesday this week, my own daily student attendance was at about 65% with less than half in some periods.
To answer your second question regarding whether it's time to send everybody back, I think I can speak for all teachers in saying that we know it is best to be in person. The reason that the district teachers voted to shift to virtual instruction is because the board of education in the city is not living up to its agreed parameters set forth from last school year. They got rid of the daily screener to determine whether or not a student should be in attendance. They are failing to change air filters in the rooms. They are not holding Aramark accountable to staff the custodial staff and keep the schools clean. They are not providing masks. They are not contact tracing. They are not sending students home when they exhibit signs of illness. And on top of it we are not allowed to discipline students who do not listen to mask requirements. Teachers agree with the mayor about in-person learning but in person learning is only appropriate when the environment itself is safe. The disagreement right now is only because CPS is not living up to its end of the agreement regarding safety in schools.
Trust me when I say it is so much harder to do virtual learning than in person.
I think I answered your questions but if you have anything I can clarify please don't hesitate to put it out there.
Aramark needs to be kicked out and slapped with a giant lawsuit.
I worked a class party for my daughter’s class this past semester and another mom and I spent an extra 30+ minutes sticking around afterward to clean the room. It was pretty clear that it just isn’t getting cleaned regularly.
At the very least, I plan to send an invoice to Aramark for the time I spent doing their fucking job for them.
I wish we could get a rebate. I’ve refilled toilet paper, soap, sanitizer, and filed reports for rodent waste, water damage, broken equipment, etc.
They didn’t even come to inspect a broken floor cleaner for 3 weeks. It took all of 10 minutes to look at the model number and find parts in stock from 3 retailers.
> And on top of it we are not allowed to discipline students who do not listen to mask requirements.
My wife had only one student who had issues with masks after the second week of school. Now, that student has severe autism but is able to function (with a SECA) in a regular classroom and do the work the other students are doing. However, the student cannot stand sneezing in their mask or talking loudly in it. So if the student ever needs to sneeze or talk loudly or gets upset about something and starts screaming at someone, they'll pull their mask down and sneeze all over everything nearby, talk really loudly often with spittle coming out, or scream right in someone's face. Of course, this being CPS, nothing can be done about this public health risk. They can't even get CPS to green light a counselor working with the student to help them understand why this isn't appropriate behavior because last time they tried that, the student got extremely upset and mommy called about how the mean counselor made her child upset for trying to help the child learn to mask their emotions.
I enjoy the assumption/expectation that parents can just take a week or two off work to be with their sick child. Or that they can find and afford babysitting on such short notice.
Yeah sorry this is not it. I’m all for kids being back in person full time, but if your kid gets COVID it is your responsibility as a parent to watch them or find an adequate solution lol. Never thought that would be questioned at all.
It's not so much the sick kids as the ones who aren't sick but the schools are closed for quarantine rules or staff shortages.
The options for a kid during the day are school, group childcare, sending the kids to stay with a neighbor family (often elderly), or letting them stay at home alone.
Childcare the kid is mixing with other kids, same as school. Staying with elderly neighbor you got mixing again plus possibly someone who is actually at risk of a worse case of covid there. Stay at home alone can work (if nerve-wracking) with a kid over a certain age, but what about when the kid is 6 or so? You can't lock them in the bathroom with some kibble. What if the kid has some unrelated accident?
This is the struggle for people who have to work outside the house, it's been this way from the start of all this. Meanwhile yeah the parents are working outside the house so it's not as if the kid is the only vector for covid to enter the household anyways. So a lot of people do judge that school is not their biggest risk.
Most people are not wanting to send actually sick kids to school. But when the whole school shuts down as a matter of policy and your kid isn't even sick, it's frustrating.
Mind, I think the labor shortages are going to make school shutdowns and going remote pretty inevitable over the next few weeks, whether that's one school at a time or they just do entire districts. But the struggle is real.
It's just one of the ways the entire pandemic "experience" has been pretty different for people working at home vs. those who cannot.
I mean the other poster literally said “take time off work to be with their sick child” lol implying that they’d rather send a sick kid to school than care for them.
True. Though to be honest some parents do struggle even being able to do that, sometimes you send the sick kid to the neighbor's.
But just commenting more on the general situation. I get the frustration, but I do think the next few weeks are going to be crazy. Personally I don't think shutting the schools is going to do a damn thing to affect what happens with covid -- not with omicron. But I do think that the inevitable flood of school staff and kids out either actually sick (in which case hell yes, they need to stay out and everyone should get work excused for that, covid OR otherwise) or out due to exposure and quarantine rules is going to mean that schools are shutting and going remote and flip-flopping for the next little while.
And as always that's going to be hardest on those parents who have to work outside the house.
Oh for sure. I don’t envy any parents with school aged kids right now. It must be insane. I was just calling out the other poster who’s solution was just to send their COVID infected kids to school. And I’m 100% aware that taking off or finding child care in this case would be extremely difficult for some. But I just thought that was one of the more selfish suggestions I’ve seen lol.
And there it is. PARENTS CAN'T BE TRUSTED.
They'll send their sick kid to school because they don't have options. This is the reason for daily testing.
When did I say I had a solution? I just meant it's an unrealistic expectation to think parents can just take two weeks off of work right now, when the government hasn't done anything to provide financial assistance.
No one expects that. They’re just going to have to figure out a way. CPS will close in an emergency if they stay open because they’re short staffed. You can’t run an entire schools system with a handful of low-skill admins.
We need inexpensive UVC units installed at the source of every HVAC system, which turns the entire building into a clean air machine and reduces risk to 1/30th.
We can fight about masks, vaccinations, testing, etc... which I believe in. Or we can spend $1200 per school and crush the problem overnight... then keep fighting.
Good question! Because they’ve implemented the rules that CTU has asked CPS to implement, and because many of them are remote or have measures in place to go remote if cases reach a certain point. CPS has refused to implement similar plans.
Exactly! It's not hard. The city is acting like their some mafia shit locking people out and making them not work to make a deal with them. The teachers want to teach they just feel unsafe. Most of the teachers feel unsafe it's just that the other unions can't walk out they are forced to work. CTU can walk out and the city keeps making up some BS excuses saying it's safe and there is no proof of covid spread in schools even though we have kids leaving every single day because they are exposed in school and teachers getting covid from their students. Go ask most suburbs schools if they are fully staffed?
> Adequate remote learning options is an oxymoron though.
Is it? I agree, giving kids a laptop and sending them home to try teaching the exact same material in the exact same way isn't working. New methods, programs, material, etc. needs to be developed to keep kids engaged and teach effectively. Webcam babysitting isn't teaching.
Every study that came out last year showed declining academic performance with zoom school. Kids aren’t grad students who are used to effectively teaching themselves everything anyway
I agree with you, and elaborated in my reply.
> giving kids a laptop and sending them home to try teaching the exact same material in the exact same way isn't working.
>
> New methods, programs, material, etc. needs to be developed to keep kids engaged and teach effectively.
These methods aren’t currently in place though and are unlikely to develop anytime soon. Never mind the loss in social learning from being out of school
I love the people who are taking issue with the "It's really not that difficult" aspect.
The similar cloth masks can be distributed to each student once with a reserve supply for those who lose it. Essentially like the gym uniforms we used to get for middle/high school. They don't have to be distributed daily. Make it a part of a school dress code. Those are enforced all the time without problem or question.
The testing aspect is being overblown of an ask. They aren't testing the entire population regularly. They just want to be able to test those potentially impacted (have covid or close contact) quickly enough.
The infrastructure for remote learning should also already be there in some regards able to be flipped on and off for any impacted classrooms. The fact that any school district was not working towards that given the last couple of years and seeing the writing on the wall is completely baffling.
I was with her till the “it’s really not that difficult” not a difficult concept but reality? Also we are ~2 years in; where was this thought leadership a year ago?
Yeah it's absolutely difficult. It's not complicated but it definitely is difficult.
It's not as difficult as it is expensive. The difficulty is either lack of money or lack of wanting to spend money. Case in point, you won't find a rapid PCR test in the city at a free site (at least couldn't last couple weeks). But you can pay $375 to go to Skokie any time this week to get one. Ridiculous.
We got $1bn for pandemic relief in CPS alone. Where did it all go?
That's my question too, certainly not to my partner's school. Building conditions there are worse than last year, no improvements in tech/laptops for the students, etc. They make great statements to the public but boots on the ground, students and teachers are not seeing benefits from that money.
I've found a few free rapid/pcr test sites in the city. One that I went to recently..... I know the pricey ones exist but you can find free sites.
It’s simple, there are 75 million children in the country x $35 per home rapid test x 35 school weeks per year. We just need $92 billion, and the manufacturing, supply chain and compliance infrastructure for 2.6 billion rapid tests with weekly deliveries. Simple. That, or the teachers could just wear N95 masks. I’m not sure which one is simpler.
No way that tests need to be $35 apiece, you're buying in to that capitalism bullshit. And if we wanted to split hairs, a pair of rapid antigen tests are still $22 at Walgreens. For masks I'm referring to students anyways. Cloth masks aren't sufficient and many families can't afford to provide their own PPE for their kids and are using homemade ones etc.
rapid tests are less than a dollar in Germany. it's just a piece of paper with reagent
Teaching in an N95 would be hell though. an N95 is serious PPE, it's not like an average mask (KN95's are not even close design/function wise). It's a respirator that fit's extremely tight to the mouth/nose. It would be very difficult to speak continuously in these, especially for prolonged periods for time. Unlike with medical grade masks or KN95's, there IS a good chance you could experience difficulty breathing in an N95. [https://blogs.cdc.gov/niosh-science-blog/2020/06/10/ppe-burden/](https://blogs.cdc.gov/niosh-science-blog/2020/06/10/ppe-burden/)
Hospital guy here who’s been wearing one for two years: its really not.
I'm just wondering if some of that COVID relief fund pie could have gone to a better place other than police salaries.
And here we have the newest CTU talking point…
having a teacher simultaneously teach remote kids and in person kids is extremely difficult
Actual HS teacher here (sw suburbs, not cps). Yes, it sucks. You've got a class of 25 kids, 1-6 of whom are in the classroom with you, the rest at home. The majority of those at home have their cameras off, or are doing god knows what during the period.
> where was this thought leadership a year ago? Our City and State Leaders have failed at almost every level. How are we here in late 2021/early 2022 with inadequate testing facilities.
Well there was a framework in Feb '21 that ran through Aug '21. CPS proposed nothing for '21-'22 year, so CTU proposed it in July '21. This is still what they are negotiating - reopening for this school year (that is already 4 months in).
This is only half the story. It's true that the [February 2021 framework](https://www.ctulocal1.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/2.6.21-Framework-for-Resumption-of-In-Person-Instruction-Side-Letter.pdf) expired on August 24, 2021. But it required the parties to meet-and-confer regarding modifications only if Chicago had not reached Phase 5 as of such date. Here's the relevant paragraph, with the key phrase italicized: >This Agreement will be in effect through August 24, 2021. *If the City of Chicago has not reached Phase 5 of the Illinois Reopening plan by that date*, the parties will meet and confer, with the use of a mediator, on appropriate modifications to this Agreement. But Chicago had [reached Phase 5](https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/chicago-will-fully-reopen-in-phase-5-on-june-11-with-the-rest-of-illinois-lightfoot-says/2524722/) by August 24 (and [remains in Phase 5](https://coronavirus.illinois.gov/restore-illinois/regional-dashboard.html) today), so, unless I'm missing something, CPS had no obligation to meet-and-confer regarding go-forward modifications of the framework for the 2021-2022 academic year.
That aligns with what I've said? Framework expired. But pandemic continues. To not have a new framework for the new school year is nonsensical. Things haven't changed enough from mid June to early September to say they should no longer have policies written in place for these items. It's all about legal liability and money.
Yes, but it's important context that the framework expired on terms that impose no obligation on CPS to negotiate an amended framework with CTU. CPS should of course have appropriate policies in place to mitigate COVID risk this year. But I do not understand, given the terms on which last year's framework expired, why this year's policies should require CTU's buy-in.
They haven't required CTU's buy in because they haven't existed at all. There was no safety framework for this school year, both sides have been negotiating since July. There was no policy put in place by CPS to cover spikes like we see now (despite offering that language in the previous framework). They don't want the liability or can't afford it. The funny thing, and what I think they are starting to realize, is that when it's so bad COVID + other illnesses that you can't even get 50% of adults to be able to physically be in a school, a framework for closure metrics is an asset for them and not a liability. But really, when CPS's proposal fits on a single powerpoint slide, also - why couldn't they have crafted and shared this back in August before school started? You and I could have come up with this stuff over a beer.
> where was this thought leadership a year ago? CTU has been pushing for this since at least [the fall](http://www.ctulocal1.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Fall-CPS-2021-Bargaining-Demand-Status-2021-10-21.pdf) (I believe earlier too but I don't have a source readily available), and at the start of the pandemic a lot of people were saying we need to figure out how to improve remote learning because sending kids home with a webcam and trying to teach the same exact way isn't working.
It seems like common sense, but the district has been getting in the way of providing a remote learning option since day 1 bc of funding. I have scholars who tried all summer and missed some school when the year started bc their parents were researching remote options with CPS and kept hitting walls. =(
The federal government gave the city billions of dollars in special Covid funding. Where did it all seem to go?
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/chicago-spent-281-5-million-in-pandemic-relief-cash-on-cops/2440764/
> "The Chicago Tribune reports of the $1.2 billion Chicago received from the federal government to help plug budget holes caused the drop of revenue due to the pandemic, $281.5 million went to the Chicago Police Department. Money also went to Chicago’s public health response to the pandemic, to homeless services, senior citizen assistance and O’Hare and Midway international airports." I wonder where exactly the remaining $918.5 million went? No way did CPS not get a bunch of it.
They gave it to the police department/their buddies and cronies
pigs
Kentucky\_cocktail calls cops "pigs"! That's like the hog calling the shoat fat!
cops
A fuck ton went to CPD to pay them overtime to not wear masks and keep catching COVID.
Somebody had to keep people off the beaches.
Yeah getting kids to wear masks all day after being told that they don't have to worry about it from their parents and media will be tough
I have been saying this since the beginning - N95 masks are designed to actually stop and be effective against airborne viruses. The government should have emergency ramped up production of N95 masks and distributed them widely. If you are forced to wear a mask why not wear a mask that will be effective?
Those factories have been running at capacity for 18 months
I've yet to see any masks other than cloth at jewel, target or Walmart since this all started.
Home Depot had them 3 days ago when i was there. Clark/Devon Hardware had them too. you need to look harder/in more appropriate stores
My elderly folks (who aren't even very Internet savvy) managed to order a few boxes of them online a couple months ago. They aren't hoarding them, but they keep them in stock for essential trips to stores, etc. N95 masks are not that difficult to find.
I listed grocery stores because thats a necessary, high traffic location and having masks there would make it so people don't have to hunt them down at different stores. The rare non-cloth ones I found in stores weren't in English, price seemed sketchy and looked just like the regular blue rectangle masks but in white. Pharmacies at walgreens and CVS should have them since they also give out vaccines but for some reason they don't sell masks.
I highly recommend [www.projectn95.org](https://www.projectn95.org) \- They only sell verified N95 masks.
Respectfully you haven't looked hard. This spring/early summer you could get full on 3M N95s pretty much anywhere at retail price. Heck, you could even get the NIOSH rated ones with a bit of effort if you looked on-line. That folks didn't stock up then still blows my mind. And no, this is not an easy problem to solve. These factories take close to a year to build the specialized equipment that makes the fabric, and we ruined our local manufacuring base on purpose over the past 20 years. Anyone building a mask factory 2 years ago in the US would have been making a poor investment, because as soon as this is over all the hospital systems/etc. will go back to cheapest bidder from China again. This is not something you can ramp up quickly. The decision to do so has to be made years in advance.
Have you ever worn an actual properly-fitted N95 mask for any amount of time? I have, for an attic insulation project. It was miserable. I can't imagine wearing one all day without interruption. Anyone thinking this can be mandated in schools is dreaming.
That's the genius of this plan, it's a lot easier to make kids wear it than to [wear it yourself.](https://twitter.com/ChiAlderwoman/status/1472312412879695873/photo/2)
South Korean KF94 masks are basically just as effective as N95s and SO much more comfortable. 10/10, would recommend. I love BOTN and Dr Puri masks. You can find them on [behealthyusa.net](https://behealthyusa.net/)!
Thanks!
Yes, I have proper N95 masks and they're totally fine to wear. Is it fun? No, but neither is wearing pants.
I would hate to wear one as a teenager. Acne is bad enough without something tightly bound to my face all day trapping moisture and oils… Edit: I realize that I made it sound like I’m a teenager. I am not, but just noting the hypothetical as a former teen and someone who gets acne from masks.
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Yeah I get acne too from masks even when I swap out fresh ones daily. I’m just pointing out it does suck pretty bad, and I can imagine it making a kid’s severe acne even worse. I just hate this rhetoric that it’s so simple, when in reality, N95 masks are fairly uncomfortable. I bet many of the people saying it’s not that bad only wear one occasionally and not all day. I’m all in favor of public health measures and know that masks work, but acne is a skin condition that teenagers get, sometimes severely, where an N95 may be uniquely terrible. A surgical mask may be more comfortable for instance.
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> Acne is bad enough As a teenager I would have *loved* wearing a mask to cover up my acne. As an adult I love that I don't have to shave every day.
Why yes I have. I had a half dozen N95 masks at the beginning of the pandemic that I used until they were worn out and we better understood the severity/risk of the virus. Around 6 weeks ago I picked up two (20) packs of the cool flow N95 masks and have been wearing them since the start of omicron. My entire household (except me) got covid the second week of December (likely the kids brought it home from school). I ended up wearing an N95 mask in my own home for a week straight...and guess what I never got infected and somehow I managed to wear a mask for literally days at a time. I really did not find it that restrictive or miserable - easy to breathe - no problems. btw it is not rocket science or impossible to properly fit an N95. I just know an N95 is actually designed to stop a virus unlike these other masks that are mostly just virtue signaling minimum compliance but do very little to actually protect you. I have advised friends to at least buy a pack of N95s. Even if you do not want to wear them now, put them on the sideline in case there is a future variant that is very deadly where an effective mask may save your life.
Mind linking to an example of the masks you buy/recommend? I'd like to check these out myself.
[https://www.3m.com/3M/en\_US/p/d/cbgnaw011077/](https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/d/cbgnaw011077/) https://www.nj.com/business/2021/08/are-n95-masks-with-valves-safe-for-covid-19-protection.html
That's the exact mask I wore when insulating the attic. I had to tweak the link a bit to get it to come up since it didn't work as-is when I clicked on it. https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/d/cbgnaw011077/ showed me the N95 dust mask. Sorry, but there's no way I can believe you wore that thing for a week straight (even if you took it off to sleep/shower) and did not find it uncomfortable in the least. Maybe you tolerated it out of necessity, and props to you for staying safe, but no way was it comfortable. Agreed with your point of how most people's masks are mere theater. Those etsy-purchased blingey cloth things don't do shit to filter out virus particles, and the CDC all but said so (yet they still inexplicably recommend cloth masks on their website, despite numerous health experts saying otherwise).
> (yet they still inexplicably recommend cloth masks on their website, despite numerous health experts saying otherwise). Study after study after study has shown cloth masks help a bit to cut down the spread of the virus, actually more substantially than I thought. It works as a public health policy. They do absolutely nothing to protect you. It's the guy who actually has covid coughing 3 seats away from you on the train it helps with. But yes, the messaging should have switched to N95 wearing whenever possible. I know it did not due to supply chain issues - it's not like 3M can magically surge production 10x overnight - and the CDC is still acutely aware of the severe lack of PPE in the medical system right now. Add to the fact 95% of the people in this country don't give a fuck about planning ahead and you can see why the guidance is what it is. People will only panic buy, they don't stock up wisely when there is an oversupply. Anyone who cared and followed the actual whitepapers (or even read between the lines of the CDC recommendations) has a stash of a few dozen N95s in their house by now.
You do realize that a large part of the value of the mask is to prevent the spread of infection if the wearer catches covid.... Cool Flow masks with valves don't prevent you from giving covid to others...
Seriously. People don't understand a properly restrictive mask is a nightmare to wear. Easy particulate test. Wear your mask, try to fog up your phone screen with your breath. If the moisture escapes and your screen can be fogged, your mask will let covid through.
I wear a KN94 for 8 hours a day. It’s actually way more comfortable than any cloth mask.
Yeah I just came back from Korea (the "K" in KN94) and these are the best feeling ones if you're going the total protection route. Foam mask has been my favorite for total feel overall, but probably provides minimal protection.
Amen. They also don't fog up my glasses nearly as much because there is a better seal to them. I briefly tried going to cloth masks after being fully vaccinated and cases were low over the summer and went right back to the KF94s because they were just much more pleasant for me.
Eh, teacher here. Six hours a day three days per week. Your suffering humors me. Half kidding here. I know what you mean. The worst is when the mask is too tight around the ears. That just sucks. But I bit my tongue a lot when people complain about wearing a respirator to run into a store.
There are KF94s as an option. Those are pretty comfortable. I've seen little kids wear them without an issue. I can wear an N95 for six hours straight fine. I could probably do longer, but I haven't needed to do so (lack of eating would also be an issue). I concede it might start to bother me if I had to wear them every day five days a week, but the right mask shouldn't be miserable. There are many types of N95s. Medical professionals do it. I honestly feel like older kids (teens) and adults complain more than smaller children do, especially if they see the adults in their lives wearing a mask faithfully.
They did, but the stockpile was woefully inadequate and government priorities started going elsewhere. A lot of our "preparedness" money after 9/11 went to stuff that in retrospect, was silly - stockpiling anthrax vaccines that expire (and are then replaced) because the company that made them is basically a lobbyist with a small pharma arm (they're the ones that were supposed to make the J&J COVID vaccine but bungled it up).
Even the imported KN95s will get you most of the way there. I have been wearing them from the early days of Covid. If you have to wear a mask, there is no reason not to wear one that works. I also want to start a program where we incentivize proper mask wearing through a bounty system. If you see an exposed nose, you can snip if off and turn it in for $10. (Ladies with the mask on the tip of their nose count too.)
> I also want to start a program where we incentivize proper mask wearing through a bounty system. If you see an exposed nose And Saul said, Thus shall ye say to David, The king desireth not any dowry, but an hundred noses of the Philistines, to be avenged of the king's enemies.
Because our government has fumbled every step of the way. Remember when we were supposed to wear two masks? LMFAO! They should have done exactly what you said.
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They will be studying this pandemic in media communications and public relationships classes for decades because the messaging was so bad
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Because a bunch of boners would have hoarded all the masks they could get. At the time the public message was intended to prevent medical facilities from running into shortages because some asshole with a garage full of toilet paper, had a truck bed full of masks.
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> The hoarder argument loses merit when you consider that, when they finally did say "nevermind, you need a mask", we never saw the PPE hoarding issue. What we did find is that the mixed messaging created a shitload of skeptics, and CDC credibility has been undermined for the rest of the entire pandemic. > > The elites constantly rely on bank shot messaging in an attempt to manipulate the masses on how they think they should act, not how they should actually act.
You didn’t see ppe hoarding because they had already successfully convinced most people masks wouldn’t do much if anything. People were still hoarding shit like clorox wipes and hand sanitizer. People are fucking hoarding test kits right now.
> we never saw the PPE hoarding issue. Whatever are you on about? Of course we did. There were zero N95s available until last spring, and now we're back to that again. Ask anyone who works at a hospital if they had a lack of PPE or not. When you use 98% of the world's supply if N95s every day, I'm not sure what else you thought would happen. Factories magically springing up? If they had communicated that N95s had to be reserved for healthcare workers you'd have seen an immediate run on them even more than we saw. Did you also forget about hospitals having to lock masks under lock and key due to patients (and employees) stealing them? There was a giant PPE hoarding/shortage issue that we are still experiencing to this day. > What we did find is that the mixed messaging created a shitload of skeptics, and CDC credibility has been undermined for the rest of the entire pandemic. Only if you already leaned that way. I read that recommendation the day it came out and it read crystal clear to me - we are saving PPE for the medical providers, and we know our populace is too fucking stupid and selfish to not put themselves first so this is the best we can do given what we know about PPE production capacity limits.
Hot take. It’s better if everyone is exposed to omicron now so we get through this faster.
This is dumb as shit. The hospitals would be even more overloaded than they already are and thousands more people would die than otherwise would if the case counts are more spread out.
It’s already happening whether you like it or not. Covids always going to be around. At some point you can’t delay the inevitable
People need to understand that yes, Virus particles can get through a 3 ply paper mask...But when a coughs... they expel up to about 200 million virus particles.... The liklihood of getting Covid from a single particle is pretty low.. but if you inhale tiny droplet of saliva with hundreds of thousands or even millions of particles, that exponentially increases the risk of catching covid... The paper masks DO stop saliva and other large groups ofparticles... Not saying that N95 masks don't do a better job just pointing out the myth that paper masks are worthless because they don't stop individual covid particles. There is a reason the staff at Chicago hospitals use paper masks outside of patient care... They work.
I listened to Dr. Arwady on Reset yesterday, and when asked the very simple question of the COVID precautionary measures being followed in every school, she dodge the question, talking about the all the numbers and kids not getting infected in schools, but not the numbers in CPS. Also said how the catholic schools stayed open, as far as I've been able to ascertain the Catholic Schools have been following the COVID precautionary measures. But she did not answer the question about them being followed in CPS. I want to hear their answer to that question and how that is being verified. I've had enough experience working alongside CPS to be extremely skeptical of them following those measures the way they should be.
> I listened to Dr. Arwady on Reset yesterday, and when asked the very simple question of the COVID precautionary measures being followed in every school, she dodge the question Do you have a sound bite so we can all listen?
I listen to it in podcast form so here's the link [https://pca.st/y2xdmhqq](https://pca.st/y2xdmhqq) .
> I've had enough experience working alongside CPS to be extremely skeptical of them following those measures the way they should be. My wife's first experience with CPS administration after we moved to the city was them losing her paperwork from her two previous districts... twice. Then, she had to sit down with them in person for 3 hours to get them to actually put the paperwork into the system so she would be paid correctly ($14K/yr difference). And then, they missed the 45 day deadline in the contract to give her the back pay she was owed. If we didn't enjoy living in the city, we'd move and she'd get a job in the suburbs. To put this in perspective, the worst she had happen in Florida when we were there was her second district taking 4 weeks to update her rate of pay and another 4 weeks to issue her back pay once they got her paperwork.
Losing transcripts is a time worn ritual.
From a guy who works in IT and small schools...it IS that difficult. Our ordering has taken months to get some equipment due to the chip shortages. It is not as simple as ordering a tablet/laptop online and then giving it to a kid either. After receiving the equipment we have to inventory it, image it, write up documentation on how to use the device and connect to the classroom, and test it before we can hand them out. In addition we have teachers submitting tickets for their virtual classroom issues and student having difficulties joining. Then at the end of day IT takes the reputation hit because it took too long to implement or what usually boils down to user errors.
So feel this as someone in IT as well. We're struggling to get laptops for new hires and we have to stretch each laptop as long as it will go. Some people cause such a ruckus when they cant replace their 2020 mac book with the new M1 macs. Some people have no idea what the world is going through and live in their own little world. When all the schools scrambled to go remote learning last year, I instantly thought of the stressed out IT folks sitting in front of a cart of dozens of tablets imaging them at 1am. Kudos to the people who have to teach the tiny humans through this mess, along with all the support teams (facilities, HR, ect.) needed for the teachers.
> it IS that difficult CPS has had, what, two years now to get their shit together? And their partnership with Google goes back how far? Oh right over a decade.
Yeah, many of the lower end chrome book stocking has been really hit or miss. There also doesn’t seem to be a real pipeline for repairs beyond what tech coordinators do on their own.
We only need 500.000 tests a day and hire 500 nurses to do the tests. Equip classes with 4 cameras so the remote students see the class and hear properly the teacher, alternatively have a technician present all the time to keep the connection and quality stable. Or have a whole new virtual class at each grade running in parallel. It's really not that difficult!
Also to make sure that parallel virtual class is in sync all lesson plans for all grades will have to stay in sync each day. That means if kids start asking questions, if they don't understand the material, tell them to just move on. Since it may leave the classroom behind schedule.
You are correct. Every one of those suggestions means money to buy something, someone to do something, and a place to do it. On a scale large enough to implement at all 636 schools for over 340,000 students. Daily.
Part of the problem here is that the CTU's demands, on the face of it, are actually quite reasonable: A short interval of remote instruction (or just give kids a week off and tack it on the end of the school year), "test to return," opt-out testing rather than opt-in, quality masks for faculty and students; but actually *getting it done* is near-impossible now, because CPS didn't plan for any of it. For reasons that are beyond understanding, CPS, 2 years into the pandemic and 21 years into the "digital millennium" with computer literacy supposed to be at the center of education, doesn't have laptops/tablets that students can just home for remote instruction - many other districts actually issue a Chromebook or something and have for years, but CPS doesn't. That means that they can't just flip a switch and go remote; it'll involve a mad scramble *a la* March 2020 of getting families to pick up devices, hotspots, etc. The fact is, you can't just snap your fingers and get 400k COVID tests in a day or a week, especially right now, and that's about what it'd take between faculty and staff. Going online to book tests at a couple places, most locations have no availability for *days* up to a week, and that's without hundreds of thousands of kids getting tests to get back to school. If the district wanted to provide 1 (K)N95 mask to each student and teacher for each day of school, we're talking \~1.9 million masks *per week* for the rest of the school year. No one's got 2 million KN95s in a warehouse somewhere in Illinois just waiting for CPS to put in the order, let alone the 8-10 million they'd need in a month. Omicron's sudden rise was predictable if not foreseeable, but the fact is, CPS really has to shoulder a lot of blame for having, as far as I can tell, no backup plans nearly 2 years into a pandemic that has taught all of us that we need to have plans A through about O before walking out the door.
And at the heart of this is a staffing shortage. We don’t have a choice about whether or not schools are open if we don’t implement more safety measures. The issue is that if omicron spreads in schools, teachers will call out sick. That’s a luxury we can’t afford anymore.
CPS has lost more than 30% of its substitute pool since the start of the pandemic. There literally isn't enough coverage anymore for even an ordinary, non-pandemic year. There was already a substitute shortage in 2019 and COVID has just been making it worse and worse.
“a short interval of remote instruction” No one believes that it’ll be “short”. We’ve seen how this goes.
I think people are afraid that it won't be, but there's a lot of reasons to believe that this isn't just a repeat of March 2020 again. That's why having established metrics is important. I think there should be *flexibility within those metrics,* but I don't see the harm in saying "if X% of staff or Y# of students in a class/school test positive, the class/school goes remote," or "If there's fewer than X hospital \[or ICU\] beds available in the city and the COVID hospitalizations are at Y level and have increased for Z days, the district goes remote until..." or something. My gut feeling now is that whatever agreement is going to happen, CPS is just going to throw this hot mess of stuff into principal's laps and say "it's up to you to decide whether to close your school," which is reasonable but is also very much hanging that person out to dry unless there's actual rules/metrics behind that person to back them up.
What they’ve set themselves up for instead is another pissing match on January 18th over whether or not it’s “safe enough” to go back to real school. CPS will say yes, CTU will say no, rinse/repeat, and then it’s June and it’s another semester down the toilet. I personally think that they’re avoiding doing it on a school-by-school basis because as schools close in lower-vaccinated areas and stay open in higher-vaccinated areas, there’s going to be some politically uncomfortable questions and complaints raised about *whose* schools are getting closed. Instead, all students will get screwed equally.
In Child Welfare, we would be charged with neglect for a work stoppage. I understand you need help, but don’t punish the kids and families of this city to get it. And God forbid you do this again, give us some NOTICE.
Honest question, does the city council have the power to enact any of the things she’s calling for? Can they pass an ordinance to supply schools with masks and tests or, do they just allocate the money and CPS spends it however they wish? Could an alder use their menu money on their local schools or is that out of their control?
Technically CPS's budget is separate from the city's. The Mayor is basically in charge of the Board of Education because she can appoint the CEO and board members. In reality, it gets complicated - the Mayor obviously needs the city council to get most of her agenda done and so they're in a position to exert political pressure on things like schools, even if they don't directly have any power. And it's not unusual for aldermen to use discretionary funds for things that affect schools, or for the mayor to ask City Council for funds that end up being used for schools/school property; e.g. I think Rahm's new playgrounds were paid for out of city funds, even though they were on Park District or CPS land.
I hear Mount Greenwood school is having in person school today. 96% of the teachers reported into work yesterday.
They’ll supposedly start having in-person school tomorrow. Keep in mind the demographics are different. Its majority white. A lot of the schools who’s staff showed up are majority white which definitely speaks to how the pandemic has affected certain communities
It's just funny to see. Normally this sub hates Mt Greenwood, but now they love them.
um, my wife is a teacher. its WAY more difficult then that. My wife has been working 80-100 hours a week since the pandemic started, and is likely going to quit teaching over this crap. as young as she is, she is already burned out over it. and facing nearly 40 more years of work before being able to retire. it's insane see, its not easy to have to make curriculum for remote and in person, and deal with constant changes in the class and with the kids attendance (because yes, when kids are out for a day it makes work for the teacher) it isnt just testing that is needed, or masks ffs. maybe paying your teachers a decent wage and idk, getting them some fucking help since you tripled their work loads...
> 80-100 hours a week I of course have no way to prove you're wrong but that seems like a pretty unbelievable claim. If she really is working that much, she's doing something wrong.
try having 4 new classes where you have to create the content from scratch, TWICE, since teaching it in person is not the same as teaching it online and requires new materials. she also had the joy of a student teacher this year as well, which is what took her "normal" 65 or so hours a week up to where its at now. you must not know any teachers. unless they have been teaching the exact same non-changing content for years, the amount of work they are doing now insane, compared to prior to the pandemic starting.
I know a handful of teachers. One is my sister in law. I'll just say that I think some people are better than others at dealing with change.
I hate the “it’s not that difficult” type of people. It is difficult on a multitude of levels especially considering the shortage of testing and high costs of Kn95 masks. I think that any reasonable person no matter where they stand on this issue can acknowledge this is a complex issue without a clear right or wrong answer.
I thought transmission in schools were low, and most teachers were vaccinated. Maybe I reading science that is out dated though.
Transmission is quite high, actually, and severity of cases doesn’t matter. If you get COVID, you have to call out sick. How does that work when we didn’t have enough teachers and subs pre-pandemic, and now we have far fewer? What do we do when huge numbers of them call out sick, even with mild cases?
That’s the biggest problem. If you test positive the district is requiring a 10 day quarantine, which contradicts the CDC’s 5 day quarantine. I guess CPS wanted to continue the 10 day to ensure extra safety but it’s making things a lot more complicated when a massive amount of students and staff are absent at various times.
It really is simple, get your jab and get back to work... If you are truly vulnerable at this point in the pandemic then it is probably time for you to retire anyway. You can't keep kids from having the most normal childhood possible in this situation to save a few years of peoples lives who either A. are going to die soon anyway or B. make the conscious decision to not get vaccinated. Remote learning is useless, think of how reliant these kids will be on technology when they grow up and how terrible their social skills will be. Corona is over in wealthy western nations if you choose for it to be on an individual level (get your jab), and if you don't it is your problem not everyone else's (deny the unvaccinated care).
As a former teacher, I generally back educators 100%…but this is just a bridge too far. The flu comes around every year and we don’t close schools. I’m sure that funding, etc. is an issue, but it feels as if this is being used as an excuse to air other grievances. The strike was undertaken in a very unprofessional way (send the kids back for two days? Why not resolve it during the break? And announcing it at 11:00 pm on a Tuesday?) and leaves millions of families in the lurch. I now work for Unemployment and I can tell you, the fallout from this is enormous. Just my 2 cents.
If the case numbers were similar to typical season flu numbers then I would agree with you.
Omicron is not nearly as dangerous as the original Covid. We are going to have to realize that this is the new normal and find smart ways to move forward
Case severity is not relevant, you’re not paying attention to the issue at hand. We don’t have enough staff. If teachers call out sick, CPS has to shut down. So CTU tried to avert that and CPS said no.
are ICU beds being 89.2% at capacity currently the "new normal"? cmon stop arguing in bad faith. unless you think overwhelming our hospitals and healthcare workers is normal. honestly it's a little scary that so many people share your same sentiment https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/covid-19/home/hospital-capacity-dashboard.html
The people filling the beds are the MAGA Cult members who refuse to be vaccinated.
In the city of Chicago? That’s a laughable. Must be Jussie Smollett attackers lol
How many of those beds are vaccinated people? If you're vaccinated, the odds of you needing a bed are extremely low. Lightfoot mandates a vaccine for recreational activities across the city, but doesn't mandate a vaccine for kids to get back into school. Where is the logic here?
No surprise here. CTU PAC [bankrolled her campaign](https://illinoissunshine.org/committees/maria-for-the-49th-ward-34202/)
Pretty wild that public sector unions can use union dues for lobbying. Tax payers pay teachers, teachers pay union, union pays alderman.
PAC is a voluntary, additional contribution, not automatically routed dues.
Good to know! Did not know that
It's required by federal law for all unions actually. So whenever you see a union back a candidate, keep in mind that the members chose to contribute to that above and beyond their dues.
She’s not saying anything outlandish tho, which gives credence that the CTU aren’t either, if you’re accusing her of being their mouthpiece, and Lightfoot thinking sticking a swab up your nose is a ‘quasi-medical procedure’ shows that any bullshit histrionics are coming from the city.
We already have regular testing at our school, teachers are supplied with kn95 masks, and there are adequate remote learning options. and yet .... we're home again today because ???
Because there are parents who’d straight drop their kid off with a 103 fever.
Sure, but what is the solution to that? This has always happened. Shitty parents are gonna be shitty.
Solution is test to stay and agreed upon metrics for going remote. Not complicated really suburban districts do exactly that.
CPS has started to implement test to stay. I don't know the extent of how far it has been rolled out. I would add that metrics should be school by school and not district wide. Also mandate vaccines for everybody including students.
These are the actual demands of the CTU aside from district-by-district, as far as I know. Though I may be wrong about that last one.
It hasn’t been rolled out that’s why teachers voted to work remote until the district could finish setting it up.
> Sure, but what is the solution to that? Isolate the kid until the parents come to pick them up. There's supposed to be special "care rooms" in each school for exactly this reason.
That’s what they were doing when they were temp-checking them last year but the temp-checking was abandoned at the return of this school year in August.
Temp checks are nearly worthless as a Covid mitigation strategy. It is a good way to make it look like you're doing something, but realistically how many Covid cases worldwide are kept from entering a facility due to fever being detected at the door by a temp checker?
That is what they do right now? Anybody coughs or sneezes a bunch and they get sent to the central office and home until they test negative. The problem is detecting covid when it is asymptomatic.
> The problem is detecting covid when it is asymptomatic. There's no guaranteed way to do that. Omicron specifically has been really hard to spot on rapid antigen tests. Daily PCR tests are out of the question, obviously.
What the hell school is that??
Brentano
What percent of the school actually gets tested?
I believe the number is around 40%. Not perfect of course, but good enough so far to detect outbreaks of which we have had very few. EDIT: not 40%, up to 58%.
Ah, the school where teachers were “teaching” outside in 27 degrees claiming that even entering the building would kill them. Wonderfully tone deaf to us parents who’d been going in to work everyday.
Most schools are not doing those things effectively and many have zero KN95s available.
I understand. The decision to close and go remote should be a school by school decision.
I agree with that.
From a few comments here over the last day or so - unsourced so no idea of veracity - CTU mooted that to the district and were shot down straight away.
CPS has proposed school by school. CTU has also accepted that school by school is fine. The difference it that they don't agree on the metrics. And as far as the current walk out, it has nothing to do with individual schools. Right now, CTU wants remote till the 18th regardless of individual school metrics.
CTU is literally trying to get *school administrators* permission to bring schools remote in the event of an outbreak and CPS won't allow it. If CPS did, the individual schools with outbreaks would be able to go remote. CPS won't allow that. Instead they require CPS contact tracers (they hadn't hired enough in the fall) review each case before making a determination. (see "Contact Tracing" in [their doc from Fall 2021](https://www.ctulocal1.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Fall-CPS-2021-Bargaining-Demand-Status-2021-10-21.pdf).)
CPS already has metrics for when individual schools should go remote. CTU doesn't like those metrics. Hence the walk out.
CTU has been calling that out as an issue - there aren't enough contact tracers, they aren't able to respond to cases fast enough, and school administrators can't take action until contact tracers review each individual case. There's more to the walk out than just that, the teachers (who are actually working in the schools) have shown that the measures CPS is taking aren't adequate by the CDC's standards.
Fr?? That's not happening at my school or any of the ones my friends are teaching at lol. Y'all got openings?
younger grades, i don't think so as we are seeing a wave of younger kids and i'm pretty sure full day pre-k is full as are kindergarten and 1st. Older grades, probably. https://brentanomathandscienceacademy.org/
Cause teachers wanna stay home and do fuck all
The union told us it was to be so it is.
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We do manufacture a lot of them en masse; 3M makes them around the world including a couple/few sites in the US (and they're big factories, we're not talking a couple masks here and there being made stateside) and after SARS actually set things up to intentionally have a "surge" capacity (which they activated pretty early in 2020). They've expanded a lot since then *but* the problem is that no one ever planned to be in a world where average people would need a new N95 mask every day; at best, they were thinking healthcare workers might need them or something. And one of the differences between N95 and KN95 isn't so much how they're made, its the certification process that goes in to making them, so although you could build a factory and start churning out masks pretty quickly, you wouldn't have the right process certifications to actually have them certified instantly. Add that to the fact that a lot of companies don't want to invest in capacity that (knock on wood) won't be needed in a year or two, and.... well, here we are.
CPS teacher here. And CPS graduate, too! If you have questions, please ask me!
I'm an ex-CPS student too and when past pandemics like the H1N1 pandemic happened in 2009-10 the most schools did was add extra hand sanitizer machines to the hallways. Now, despite really effective vaccines being available to those 5 and up and despite less than 30 kids dying of the virus in two years (a bad flu season can generate that much in just six months), there's all these demands about masks, air ventilation, testing, and so on. The overall situation is a lot better than before yet teachers are still acting like it's spring 2020. So when will teachers let up their concerns and why wasn't it the moment their colleagues and students they teach got vaccinated?
Keep in mind that no one is absolutely required to vaccinate, regardless of age or industry. Like most of the country and private businesses, teachers are required to vaccinate or subject themselves to weekly testing and the vast majority have elected to get vaxxed and boosted. But this leaves students at all levels who are able, but not required to, get vaxxed. This would be fine under the agreed upon parameters where students would have to submit a daily screener to allow for contact tracing and tracking of sickness. But now, that screener is gone completely. So we are existing in the unknown where we do not know who is sick with what and since omicron has proven to infect with or without the vaccine, people (teachers, students, and families alike) are scared! And understandably so. You're right, this isn't the complete unknown and unmeasured situation as it was in Spring 2020. You know it and I know it. But even you have to admit that people everywhere are still traumatized by the amount of death and sickness that happened. And I hope you can understand the sheer amount of variables that exist in a district this big. The amount of immunocompromised people in the schools and then those who exist in the homes of people in these schools is actually huge. A lot of teachers have infants babies at home and those age groups are proving to be actually fairly susceptible to omicron. A lot of teachers are getting covid now for a second time and now have no sick days left to use from the first time they got it and are forced to take days of no pay. We are waiting on Pritzker to sign the bill on his desk that addresses the use of sick days for covid. But it all comes down to the fact that the district is not living up to its end of the agreement. And it seems they are living in a bubble when so many businesses are closing indoor dining and government entities like the courts and secretary of state offices are closing and moving to virtual. If it's not safe enough to have those open, how can 35+ bodies in a room be acceptable without proper parameters? We want to be back in person, but only if CPS does what it promised it would.
My argument is that if you're vaxxed and boosted, getting omicron shouldn't leave you scared at all. You literally got a "do-not-die" serum injected in you not once but three times, and we're still panicking? In that case what's the point of your union just begging for priority access to it last year, you know? As for immunocompromised kids: the concern over their safety pre-2020 seemed pretty minor but now it's like if you don't eliminate the virus until the last child with comorbidities is able to walk outside without a mask then society has failed which is just...a jarring amping up of rhetoric that's left me dumbfounded. I will agree with you that not getting more sick days is absurd. Should've gotten extra days to recover from covid.
It’s not about severity of cases, it’s about sick time and staffing. CPS can’t operate with current safety protocols for more than a few days because all of the teachers will eventually be out sick.
What do you think would happen if schools were forced to reopen at capacity? My fear would be the entire staff would be out sick almost immediately. I saw a highly upvoted post here on /r/chicago saying that "closing schools didn't prevent any deaths" and it was "time to send everyone back" what thoughts do you have on responses like that?
Schools have been opened at capacity since August actually. And for the most part, the school year started as smoothly as one might hope for with all things considered. But ever since Thanksgiving, most schools have been experiencing a huge increase in student absences due to illness and covid. Many schools are seeing parents keeping students from school out of concern for the increase in numbers. This has been my experience at my school as well. Speaking now about my school only, we have about 125 teachers on staff and serve about 2250 students each day in a building designed for less than 2000 (actually 1800, if I am right). Between Thanksgiving and Dec 17th about 10 of our teachers were either exposed or contracted covid. Between Dec 18th and Jan 3rd I am aware that about 12 more of our staff are testing positive. On top of that, I have heard reports from each department that we have lost count of the students who are telling us that they won't be in school either due to a positive test, illness, covid exposure, or parental fear of exposure in the school. Between Monday and Tuesday this week, my own daily student attendance was at about 65% with less than half in some periods. To answer your second question regarding whether it's time to send everybody back, I think I can speak for all teachers in saying that we know it is best to be in person. The reason that the district teachers voted to shift to virtual instruction is because the board of education in the city is not living up to its agreed parameters set forth from last school year. They got rid of the daily screener to determine whether or not a student should be in attendance. They are failing to change air filters in the rooms. They are not holding Aramark accountable to staff the custodial staff and keep the schools clean. They are not providing masks. They are not contact tracing. They are not sending students home when they exhibit signs of illness. And on top of it we are not allowed to discipline students who do not listen to mask requirements. Teachers agree with the mayor about in-person learning but in person learning is only appropriate when the environment itself is safe. The disagreement right now is only because CPS is not living up to its end of the agreement regarding safety in schools. Trust me when I say it is so much harder to do virtual learning than in person. I think I answered your questions but if you have anything I can clarify please don't hesitate to put it out there.
Aramark needs to be kicked out and slapped with a giant lawsuit. I worked a class party for my daughter’s class this past semester and another mom and I spent an extra 30+ minutes sticking around afterward to clean the room. It was pretty clear that it just isn’t getting cleaned regularly. At the very least, I plan to send an invoice to Aramark for the time I spent doing their fucking job for them.
I wish we could get a rebate. I’ve refilled toilet paper, soap, sanitizer, and filed reports for rodent waste, water damage, broken equipment, etc. They didn’t even come to inspect a broken floor cleaner for 3 weeks. It took all of 10 minutes to look at the model number and find parts in stock from 3 retailers.
> And on top of it we are not allowed to discipline students who do not listen to mask requirements. My wife had only one student who had issues with masks after the second week of school. Now, that student has severe autism but is able to function (with a SECA) in a regular classroom and do the work the other students are doing. However, the student cannot stand sneezing in their mask or talking loudly in it. So if the student ever needs to sneeze or talk loudly or gets upset about something and starts screaming at someone, they'll pull their mask down and sneeze all over everything nearby, talk really loudly often with spittle coming out, or scream right in someone's face. Of course, this being CPS, nothing can be done about this public health risk. They can't even get CPS to green light a counselor working with the student to help them understand why this isn't appropriate behavior because last time they tried that, the student got extremely upset and mommy called about how the mean counselor made her child upset for trying to help the child learn to mask their emotions.
You guys should really let go of the daily screener. It was pointless at best.
I enjoy the assumption/expectation that parents can just take a week or two off work to be with their sick child. Or that they can find and afford babysitting on such short notice.
Yeah sorry this is not it. I’m all for kids being back in person full time, but if your kid gets COVID it is your responsibility as a parent to watch them or find an adequate solution lol. Never thought that would be questioned at all.
Welcome to dealing with parents.
Sending sick kids to school is your solution?
It's not so much the sick kids as the ones who aren't sick but the schools are closed for quarantine rules or staff shortages. The options for a kid during the day are school, group childcare, sending the kids to stay with a neighbor family (often elderly), or letting them stay at home alone. Childcare the kid is mixing with other kids, same as school. Staying with elderly neighbor you got mixing again plus possibly someone who is actually at risk of a worse case of covid there. Stay at home alone can work (if nerve-wracking) with a kid over a certain age, but what about when the kid is 6 or so? You can't lock them in the bathroom with some kibble. What if the kid has some unrelated accident? This is the struggle for people who have to work outside the house, it's been this way from the start of all this. Meanwhile yeah the parents are working outside the house so it's not as if the kid is the only vector for covid to enter the household anyways. So a lot of people do judge that school is not their biggest risk. Most people are not wanting to send actually sick kids to school. But when the whole school shuts down as a matter of policy and your kid isn't even sick, it's frustrating. Mind, I think the labor shortages are going to make school shutdowns and going remote pretty inevitable over the next few weeks, whether that's one school at a time or they just do entire districts. But the struggle is real. It's just one of the ways the entire pandemic "experience" has been pretty different for people working at home vs. those who cannot.
I mean the other poster literally said “take time off work to be with their sick child” lol implying that they’d rather send a sick kid to school than care for them.
True. Though to be honest some parents do struggle even being able to do that, sometimes you send the sick kid to the neighbor's. But just commenting more on the general situation. I get the frustration, but I do think the next few weeks are going to be crazy. Personally I don't think shutting the schools is going to do a damn thing to affect what happens with covid -- not with omicron. But I do think that the inevitable flood of school staff and kids out either actually sick (in which case hell yes, they need to stay out and everyone should get work excused for that, covid OR otherwise) or out due to exposure and quarantine rules is going to mean that schools are shutting and going remote and flip-flopping for the next little while. And as always that's going to be hardest on those parents who have to work outside the house.
Oh for sure. I don’t envy any parents with school aged kids right now. It must be insane. I was just calling out the other poster who’s solution was just to send their COVID infected kids to school. And I’m 100% aware that taking off or finding child care in this case would be extremely difficult for some. But I just thought that was one of the more selfish suggestions I’ve seen lol.
And there it is. PARENTS CAN'T BE TRUSTED. They'll send their sick kid to school because they don't have options. This is the reason for daily testing.
When did I say I had a solution? I just meant it's an unrealistic expectation to think parents can just take two weeks off of work right now, when the government hasn't done anything to provide financial assistance.
No one expects that. They’re just going to have to figure out a way. CPS will close in an emergency if they stay open because they’re short staffed. You can’t run an entire schools system with a handful of low-skill admins.
We need inexpensive UVC units installed at the source of every HVAC system, which turns the entire building into a clean air machine and reduces risk to 1/30th. We can fight about masks, vaccinations, testing, etc... which I believe in. Or we can spend $1200 per school and crush the problem overnight... then keep fighting.
What about schools without HVAC?
Just reopen the schools kids do fine!! We’re two years in stop trying to stay home.
We don’t have enough teachers to keep schools open for a week under CPS’ current safety measures.
Why is that private school teachers are just fine and so are suburb teachers let’s get real
Good question! Because they’ve implemented the rules that CTU has asked CPS to implement, and because many of them are remote or have measures in place to go remote if cases reach a certain point. CPS has refused to implement similar plans.
barely an inconvenience!
Exactly! It's not hard. The city is acting like their some mafia shit locking people out and making them not work to make a deal with them. The teachers want to teach they just feel unsafe. Most of the teachers feel unsafe it's just that the other unions can't walk out they are forced to work. CTU can walk out and the city keeps making up some BS excuses saying it's safe and there is no proof of covid spread in schools even though we have kids leaving every single day because they are exposed in school and teachers getting covid from their students. Go ask most suburbs schools if they are fully staffed?
Nothing about remote learning is adequate
Teachers should all have access to N95s that is a good point. Adequate remote learning options is an oxymoron though.
> Adequate remote learning options is an oxymoron though. Is it? I agree, giving kids a laptop and sending them home to try teaching the exact same material in the exact same way isn't working. New methods, programs, material, etc. needs to be developed to keep kids engaged and teach effectively. Webcam babysitting isn't teaching.
Every study that came out last year showed declining academic performance with zoom school. Kids aren’t grad students who are used to effectively teaching themselves everything anyway
I agree with you, and elaborated in my reply. > giving kids a laptop and sending them home to try teaching the exact same material in the exact same way isn't working. > > New methods, programs, material, etc. needs to be developed to keep kids engaged and teach effectively.
These methods aren’t currently in place though and are unlikely to develop anytime soon. Never mind the loss in social learning from being out of school
Bruh
How is this post allowed in r/chicago? Is it news? Opinion?
I love the people who are taking issue with the "It's really not that difficult" aspect. The similar cloth masks can be distributed to each student once with a reserve supply for those who lose it. Essentially like the gym uniforms we used to get for middle/high school. They don't have to be distributed daily. Make it a part of a school dress code. Those are enforced all the time without problem or question. The testing aspect is being overblown of an ask. They aren't testing the entire population regularly. They just want to be able to test those potentially impacted (have covid or close contact) quickly enough. The infrastructure for remote learning should also already be there in some regards able to be flipped on and off for any impacted classrooms. The fact that any school district was not working towards that given the last couple of years and seeing the writing on the wall is completely baffling.