ASSESSING WEEK 1
CPS chief Jackson says phased-in reopening working
Chicago Public Schools CEO Janice Jackson sat for a one-on-one interview Thursday with the Sun-Times at Kershaw Elementary in Englewood, near the end of the first week of schools reopening. Here is an edited transcript:
K-8 reopening
Sun-Times: How has the first week of reopening gone?
Jackson: I’m happy with the first week. Of course, I’m excited that we’re back.
A lot of people are nervous about the return to school, implementing the protocols. And so I think it’s easier when you come back with a smaller group of students to really get the rhythm. So I haven’t heard major concerns. Every school opening, you have to deal with logistical things here and there, but overall it has met my expectations.
Staffing concerns
Sun-Times: There are principals who are worried about staffing. If a few teachers get sick, they don’t really have a backup plan. What do you say to those principals?
Jackson: We keep getting this question, and I don’t think it’s helpful in the aggregate, right? Because on the whole, we’re ready to go. Now obviously there’s schools that are outliers where we have concerns, and to your point, if a large number of teachers get sick, then yeah, we have to deal with that issue. But we have put those protocols in place.
Our principals are being extremely flexible at the ground level. You have some schools where maybe one first-grade teacher is the remote teacher because they have an accommodation and the person who’s in-person is now teaching all the students that come.
New hires
Sun-Times: What are the obstacles to finding the 2,000 seasonal employees and cadre substitutes you set out to hire? You’re only a little over halfway there.
Jackson: With the miscellaneous employees, we’re closer than we are with cadres. And I feel like that’s a group where we’re going to nail that number. It’s more about getting individuals to know about the opportunities.
The cadre group is the harder group to crack. In some cases these are licensed teachers who may be licensed to teach in other areas but we have them filling in in different spaces.
We’re also now trying to be a little bit more aggressive in reaching directly out to people through LinkedIn and other mechanisms to get them signed on.
Sun-Times: It’s a pandemic and people need opportunities, but do you think the difficulty is because the seasonal jobs are minimum wage with no benefits?
Jackson: No, well, I think people need to work. I don’t think that there’s more stuff you can do to sweeten the deal. I mean, you’ve got people who are either going to work during a pandemic or people who don’t yet feel comfortable coming into the building.
The requirements to get the job are pretty low, so I think that we’ll be fine.
Vaccines and the fourth quarter
Sun-Times: Do you expect staffing issues in the fourth quarter if thousands more families choose in-person learning like you’re hoping?
Jackson: I think our staffing is going to be better. Because a lot of the accommodations are related to people with medical conditions and the fact that we’ve been vaccinating people at such a fast clip, I think that that’s going to really help us.
Sun-Times: Do you think you’re going to be able to accommodate any students who do want to come back in the fourth quarter?
Jackson: I think we’ll be able to do it. In most cases, even in districts like in Florida and Texas where there’s always been a requirement to offer in-person all day, every day, you rarely see above 50% [of students returning], maybe around 60% or 65% at kind of the highest position. There are going to be questions about what the fall looks like, and we will be looking to the CDC as well as [the Illinois State Board of Education] and [Illinois Department of Public Health] to provide guidance around how we do that.
I think that if you have more parents wanting to come, I count that as a good problem. We would have to figure it out, we would have to look at alternative spaces.
High school reopening plans
Sun-Times: How do you get a high school plan that works? What’s the compromise there?
Jackson: I heard the union president say he believes schools can open this year, so that’s great. We have to sit down at the table with them and figure out how to do it, and what those compromises are.
Sun-Times: Aside from CTU negotiations, what does it look like for in-person high school?
Jackson: Right now the way our plan — which we put out in August, that obviously we didn’t bring high schoolers back — we did talk about pods, we talked about creative scheduling where instead of kids having eight classes, maybe you have four on a given day or four in a semester, and that way you’re reducing the number of transitions.
Educational impact of the pandemic
Sun-Times: How worried are you about learning loss?
Jackson: I’m happy that the press is acknowledging learning loss now because for a while people were acting like we were making it up.
People have studied other places where natural disasters have occurred and kids have been out of school for extended periods of time, like Puerto Rico. So it is a big concern. And there’s a body of research that shows when kids are excluded from school, when they don’t have access to high quality teachers, that the learning is impacted. Couple that with what we already know about the disparities in learning here in Chicago between Black students in particular, Latino students, white students and Asian students, I’m very concerned about that.
And so our Teaching and Learning Department right now is working on our “unfinished learning plan,” which is what we’re calling it. And so we’re going to be putting out guidance around how we address that. What that’s going to look like will vary at each school level because we think the principals and LSCs and the teachers at the local level will have a better idea about what their students need in order to recover. But we’re going to be using our CARES money and stimulus money to support our students. And I want to be clear, the goal is not remediation.
Sun-Times: Some families are saying they’re happy to make it through the pandemic, to have survived. Is it part of your thinking to not put more pressure on kids because they’ve had all this happen over the past year?
Jackson: I reject the notion that having expectations around learning is putting undue pressure on students. White students and affluent students across this country have been learning and presented with opportunities throughout the pandemic, and it shouldn’t be an excuse for Black and Latino students, or poor students, not to have those opportunities.
We can’t make excuses and leave our kids behind when their peers from more affluent communities and backgrounds are continuing to move ahead. They’re still taking the ACT, SAT, they’re still applying to colleges. The kids in CPS deserve the same opportunities.
Jackson’s future
Sun-Times: In terms of yourself and navigating this whole situation over the past year, how long do you see yourself sticking with CPS?
Jackson: I think I’ve proven throughout this process that I can handle everything that’s thrown my way. It hasn’t been an easy stint. I’ve been the CEO for the past 3½ years but in senior leadership for six. We’ve dealt with a financial crisis, sex abuse scandal, strike, almost two strikes.
So I don’t have a timeline on anything. I’m here for the district, and as long as I’m here I’m going to continue to do what I think is an exceptional job for the kids here in CPS.
Trust in the system
Sun-Times: Part of the reason some families haven’t come back is their lack of trust in the system. Why isn’t that trust there, and do you think you’ve done enough to build trust with families?
Jackson: I think the trust has to be at the local level. If parents need me to tell them to send their kids to school, that’s never going to happen.
But parents by and large trust their teachers and they trust their principals. So throughout this process the places where we’ve seen higher opt-in rates, is because they have strong relationships at the local level.
As a school system, we have to do a better job of transparency and communication. I think we’ve made a lot of progress, but we still hear from people that they want more opportunities to weigh in before we make decisions.