Chicago Teachers Union authorizes collective action to remain remote, but some students may return to school Feb. 1 as negotiations continue
CHICAGO — After days of voting on whether to refuse to return for in-person teaching, the Chicago Teachers Union announced Sunday its members “overwhelmingly” chose to conduct only remote work beginning Monday.
That’s when teachers and school staff who are in the second wave of the Chicago Public Schools’ coronavirus reopening plan were to report to school to prepare for Feb. 1, when some of the district’s 70,000 elementary school students are to return for their first in-person classes since schools closed in March.
In the first wave, which was supposed to include 6,500 students, preschool and special education teachers without an exemption were ordered to report back Jan. 4 to prepare for Jan. 11 classes. Only 19% of students who had said they wanted in-person instruction showed, according to the CTU.
“CPS wants to present to parents that in-person learning right now — before vaccination and with high community spread of COVID-19 — can look like it did before the pandemic. The district is demanding that 80 percent of educators need to return for less than 20 percent of students,” a Sunday post on the CTU website to its members said.
Asked about the vote in an interview Sunday afternoon, Mayor Lori Lightfoot struck an optimistic tone.
“What I know is that we’re still at the table, we’re still bargaining, we’ve narrowed the range of issues and it’s certainly my hope that we will get a deal done,” she said.
Union officials said 86% of the roughly 25,000 rank-and-file members voted in the union’s first-ever remote, electronic vote. And of those, the union said, 71% “have chosen safety.”
“CPS did everything possible to divide us by instilling fear through threats of retaliation, but you still chose unity, solidarity and to collectively act as one,” the post on its website said.
But CTU leaders also apparently were surprised by the district’s response to the vote, accusing the district of attempting to “sow dissent and disrupt collective union action.”
Once word about the vote results started circulating on social media, district officials put out a statement saying the negotiations aren’t over yet. And because CPS doesn’t want to risk “disruption to student learning,” it agreed to a request from union leadership “to push back the return of K-8 teachers and staff to Wednesday, Jan. 27,” the statement said.
Union leaders said they did not make a request to move the return date.
“CPS unilaterally made the decision to move the return date for K-8 teachers back to Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2021. The Union currently has no agreement with the district on any terms,” they said, adding that an agreement could come soon but the district statement is like a step back after two steps forward.
“Emails like that don’t help,” CTU President Jesse Sharkey is quoted as saying in an email.
The district statement said the two sides continue bargaining in hopes of reaching an agreement that will allow the families that opted for in-person learning to send their children back to elementary schools Feb. 1.
“The scheduled return date for students in grades K-8 remains Monday, Feb. 1, and it is our goal to reach an agreement with CTU as soon as possible to ensure tens of thousands of additional students have the opportunity to safely return to our classrooms,” the statement said.
Sources within the union said they anticipated the district would announce classes will happen on Feb. 1 no matter what. They reiterated that union members did not vote for a work stoppage and will not stop working, but they voted to work remotely.
They will not go back to schools until they think it is safe and urge CPS to come up with health metrics for when a school should be closed, and to take the idea of synchronous teaching — instructing in-person and remote students simultaneously — off the table. As of Sunday afternoon, the district hadn’t budged on those two items, the sources said.
And while the CPS letter says the two sides “now agree on far more than we disagree,” forcing teachers to go into what the union characterizes as “unsafe buildings” is a major sticking point, according to the union’s statement on vote results posted to its website.
About 37% of preschool through eighth grade students have opted to return to classrooms, 47% chose to continue remote learning and 16% did not respond, according to CPS figures on the students who make up the second wave of in-person instruction. No return date has been set for high school students.
Lightfoot expressed concern that ongoing battles among City Hall, the Board of Education and the teachers union would leave a greater impression of instability in Chicago’s schools, particularly after divisive teachers strikes in 2013 on then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s watch and in 2019 during her first year as mayor. The 2019 strike lasted 15 days, resulted in 11 canceled school days and ended with a five-year, $1.5 billion deal between teachers and the Lightfoot-controlled CPS.
“Here’s what I’m hearing from residents all around the city and from parents in particular: If we don’t have stability in the public school system, why should we stay in Chicago? If we have to worry about lockouts and strikes, particularly after a historic contract where everyone thought we had bought labor peace for five years, people vote with their feet,” Lightfoot said. “And what I worry about is with young families, one of the first questions they ask is, ‘How is the school system?’ And if the answer is, ‘completely rife with strife and uncertainty,’ that sends a real message: Don’t stay in Chicago.”
Lightfoot said the city needs to be “growing our population, not shrinking it” and said “the public school system is a critical part of our economic future.”
Asked whether the CTU vote represented the union’s latest step in escalating a political feud with her, Lightfoot replied, “I’m not going there.
“I’m focused on getting a deal done so our kids can learn in a safe and nurturing environment,” she said. “That’s what I’m focused on.”
