As more unions push for remote schooling, parents worry
Few U.S. cities have labor politics as fraught as Chicago’s, where the nation’s third-largest school system shut down this past week after teachers’ union members refused to work in person, arguing classrooms were unsafe amid the omicron surge.
But in a number of other places, the tenuous labor peace that has allowed most schools to operate normally this year is in danger of collapsing.
While not yet threatening to walk off the job, unions are back at negotiating tables, pushing in some cases for a return to remote learning. They frequently cite understaffing because of illness, and shortages of rapid tests and medical-grade masks. Some teachers, in a rear-guard action, have staged sickouts.
In Milwaukee, schools are remote until Jan.
18, because of staffing issues.
But the teachers’ union president, Amy Mizialko, doubts the situation will significantly improve and worries that the school board will resist extending online classes.
“I anticipate it’ll be a fight,” Mizialko said.
She credited the district for at least delaying in-person schooling to start the year but criticized Democratic officials for placing unrealistic pressure on teachers and schools.
“I think that Joe Biden and Miguel Cardona and the newly elected mayor of New York City and Lori Lightfoot — they can all declare that schools will be open,” Mizialko added, referring to the U.S. education secretary and the mayor of Chicago. “But unless they have hundreds of thousands of people to step in for educators who are sick in this uncontrolled surge, they won’t be.”
For many parents and teachers, the pandemic has become a slog of anxiety over the risk of infection, child care crises, the tedium of school-through-a-screen and, most of all, chronic instability.
And for Democrats, the revival of tensions over remote schooling is a distinctly unwelcome development.
Because they have close ties to the unions, Democrats are concerned additional closures like those in Chicago could lead to a possible replay of the party’s recent loss in Virginia’s governor race. Polling showed school disruptions were an important issue for swing voters who broke Republican — particularly suburban white women.
More than 1 million of the country’s 50 million public school students were affected by districtwide shutdowns in the first week of January, many of which were announced abruptly and triggered a wave of frustration among parents.
“The kids are not the ones that are seriously ill by and large, but we know kids are the ones suffering from remote learning,” said Dan Kirk, whose son attends Walter Payton College Preparatory High School in Chicago, which was closed amid the district’s standoff this week.
Several nonunion charter-school networks and districts temporarily transitioned to remote learning after the holidays. But as has been true throughout the pandemic, most of the temporary districtwide closures — including in Detroit, Cleveland and Milwaukee — are taking place in liberal-leaning areas with powerful unions and a more cautious approach to the coronavirus.
The unions’ demands echo the ones they have made for nearly two years, despite all that has changed. There are now vaccines and the reassuring knowledge that in-school transmission of the virus has been limited. The omicron variant, while highly contagious, appears to cause less severe illness than previous iterations of COVID-19.
Most district leaders and many educators say it is imperative for schools to remain open. They cite a large body of research showing that closures harm children, academically and emotionally, and widen income and racial disparities.
But some local union officials are far warier of packed classrooms. In Newark, New Jersey, schools began 2022 with an unexpected stretch of remote learning, set to end Jan. 18. John Abeigon, the Newark Teachers Union president, said that he was hopeful about the return to buildings but he remained unsure if every school could operate safely. Student vaccination is far from universal, and most parents have not consented to their children taking regular virus tests.
Abeigon said that if tests remain scarce, he might ask for remote learning at specific schools with low vaccination rates and high case counts. He agreed that online learning was a burden to working parents but argued that educators should not be sacrificed for the good of the economy.
“I’d see the entire city of Newark unemployed before I allowed one single teacher’s aide to die needlessly,” he said.
In Los Angeles, the district has worked closely with the union to keep classrooms open after one of the longest pandemic shutdowns in the country last school year. The vaccination rate for students 12 and older is about 90%, with a student vaccine mandate set to kick in this fall. All students and staff are tested for the virus weekly.
Still, the president of the local union, Cecily MyartCruz, would not rule out pushing for a districtwide return to remote learning in the coming weeks.
“You know, I want to be honest — I don’t know,” she said.
The tensions are not limited to liberal states. In Kentucky, teachers’ unions and at least one large school district have said they need the flexibility to go remote amid escalating infection rates.
But the Republicancontrolled state legislature has granted no more than 10 days for such instruction districtwide, and unions there worry that may be inadequate. Jeni Ward Bolander, a leader of a statewide union, said that teachers may have to walk off the job.
“Frustration is building on teachers,” Ward Bolander said. “I hate to say we’d walk out at that point, but it’s absolutely possible.”
National teachers’ unions continue to call for classrooms to remain open, but local affiliates hold the most power in negotiations over whether individual districts will close schools.
“The kids are not the ones that are seriously ill by and large, but we know kids are the ones suffering from remote learning.”
– DAN KIRK, WHOSE SON ATTENDS WALTER PAYTON COLLEGE PREPARATORY HIGH SCHOOL IN CHICAGO