Leader: By data, schools are safe
CPS CEO Jackson says district’s mitigation strategies are working
On the radio, at news conferences and in remarks to the Chicago Board of Education, Chicago Public Schools CEO Janice Jackson has belabored two points last week: Numerous studies show that schools can open safely under the right circumstances, even if educators are still waiting on COVID-19 vaccines, and the weeks since CPS welcomed back a small group of students prove that the district’s mitigation strategies are working.
But the Chicago Teachers Union sees things differently, and if the parties don’t land on an agreement soon, CTU members are preparing to strike if they are locked out of their online accounts for refusing to work in person.
While the district made some concessions in negotiations in recent days, the union is still not satisfied with plans for surveillance testing, vaccination availability and the health metrics that
will guide future decisions about opening or closing schools.
With notable vaccine hesitancy and the reality that no matter how long Chicago waits to reopen schools, not everyone will have a vaccine, Jackson has asked: “If not now, when?”
Speaking on “The Maze Jackson Show” Friday, the CPS leader said that equity is what motivates her.
“How do we make it better for Black children like myself who grew up in this school system?” she said. “… Everybody is trying to claim this equity argument about reopening, and it’s actually pretty frustrating. At the end of the day, we know that our children need to be back in school.”
Overall, fewer than 1 in 5 eligible CPS students have returned for in-person classes. White CPS students have chosen in-person learning at the highest rates and were more likely than their Black, Latino or Asian peers to ultimately return. But Black students also have the lowest participation in remote learning and highest absentee rate overall, at 13%.
District officials have made the case that white students being disproportionately represented does not negate the responsibility to provide the in-person option for families of color.
While more than 3,000 prekindergarten and special education students returned to schools the week of Jan. 11, in-person classes were called off starting Wednesday in light of a CTU resolution for members to work only remotely. Roughly 84% of teachers ordered back have stayed home.
The week students went back, CPS reported 51 COVID-19 cases tied to schools, 45 adults and six students. The week of Jan. 4, when staff returned, 34 cases were reported, all adults.
Since the district started tracking cases in the spring, the numbers were lowest in June and July, when hardly anyone was working in person aside from administrators and lunchroom staff at the schools used as summer meal sites.
There was a slight uptick around the time clerks, security officers and technology coordinators had to start reporting to schools in late August, but the biggest spike, in mid-November, correlates with a surge in community transmission rather than any wave of staff returning.
Weekly cases dipped to nine and 10 over winter break. So far, the district’s surveillance testing program has caught three presumptive positive cases. Dozens of staff and students have been told to quarantine due to potential exposure at school.
“What we have not seen are superspreader events in our schools, clusters in our schools were we have had to close,” Jackson said Thursday on WBEZ.
Asking students and staff to quarantine presents its own form of instability, and claiming schools are safe “flies in the face of the experiences that many of us educators have,” said CTU Vice President Stacy Davis Gates.
“Yes, I understand that they’re not, quote, ‘super spreaders,’ ” Davis Gates said in a clip played back to Jackson. “But they are spreaders.”
Jackson reiterated that it’s impossible to guarantee a virus-free environment, decisions about schools can’t be dictated by fear and the district has consulted with public health officials every step of the way.
A vaccine is “a phenomenal tool,” Jackson said, but so are masks, social distancing and proper hygiene.
“I believe we are using science,” Jackson said. “And I would challenge anybody to present me with science that says school reopening isn’t safe. People are saying things that simply don’t hold up under scrutiny.”
While a growing body of research shows little evidence that schools contribute to coronavirus prevalence, skeptics question whether it’s reasonable to apply findings based on certain geographic or demographic groups to Chicago Public Schools.
Some of the latest school reopening research to make the rounds was released last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC researchers studied 17 schools in a rural Wisconsin county and found that students and staff had a lower COVID-19 rate than Wood County overall, 3,453 compared with 5,466 per 100,000 people. At 73,000, the population of the whole county is comparable to the number of CPS students who opted in for the first two waves. During a 13-week period examined in the Wisconsin study, 191 cases were identified among students and staff members, with only seven linked to transmission in school, according to the report: “Despite widespread community transmission, COVID-19 incidence in schools conducting in-person instruction was 37% lower than that in the surrounding community.”
A study published in late December by the American Institutes for Research focusing on schools in Washington and Michigan found that opening schools is less likely to increase COVID-19 spread in communities with low case numbers, but more likely when community transmission is already high.
In January, the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice published a report by Tulane University researchers who found no evidence that reopening schools increased COVID-19-related hospitalizations in counties that had low hospitalization rates before schools reopened. But they could not say the same for communities that had already been experiencing 36 to 44 per 100,000 people newly hospitalized each week with COVID-19.
“In the counties with higher pre-opening COVID-19-hospitalization rates, however, the results are inconclusive,” according to the Tulane researchers. “While we still sometimes see evidence of reduced hospitalizations, the estimates also sometimes suggest the opposite. This possibility of increased hospitalizations is consistent with the idea that social interaction creates more negative health outcomes when there is more of the virus to be spread, perhaps despite careful school safety measures.”
As of Wednesday, of the 848 school districts in Illinois, 46% were using a hybrid plan with both inperson and remote learning; 30% were strictly in person; and 24% were all remote.
Still, statewide, of the nearly 2 million students enrolled in Illinois public schools, about half are enrolled in strictly remote learning, including the 350,000 CPS students at 629 city schools. Around 713,000 students are learning under a hybrid plan, and about 183,000 with a traditional, in-person model.
While the Illinois Department of Public Health had reviewed more than 160 school outbreaks as of midDecember, officials reported only three outbreaks of five or more cases for the period ending Jan. 22, none in the Chicago area.
On Friday, the superintendent of Lockport Township High School District 205 notified families that schools will go back to remote learning for two weeks starting Feb. 8 because the number of students on quarantine went from 47 two weeks ago to 118.
For suburban Chicago administrators who have been observing the CPS vs. CTU showdown from the sidelines, the conflict has been eliciting equal parts empathy and relief.
“All teachers want kids back in school, Arlington Heights teachers and Chicago teachers, but there’s a lot of logistics to doing that safely,” said Arlington Heights School District 25 Superintendent Lori Bein. The type of acrimony that divides the CTU and CPS administrators is also unheard of at District 25, Bein said.
“Back in March, we all sat down at the table and asked ourselves, ‘How can we do this together?’ ” Bein said. “The teachers union is made up of teachers, and we are a community that loves our teachers.”
While the district’s seven elementary schools and two middle schools started a hybrid plan in October, the unpredictability of the virus means school officials have to be flexible and follow the data, even when it means having to temporarily close a school due to an outbreak, Bein said.
Such was the case shortly before the start of winter break, in mid-December, when Bein announced that the Cook County Department of Public Health had recommended that Thomas Middle School — which had just reopened after being closed for two weeks by a COVID-19 outbreak — would move to an all-remote learning model again until mid-January.
“It hasn’t been easy, and it hasn’t been pretty, and it’s still fluid, but it has worked out well because we had a transition plan,” Bein said.
When the 16,500 students in Naperville School District 203 headed back to the classroom last week, their return after months of careful planning and heated community debate coincided with the largest snowfall of the season.
“I was of course nervous that it could turn out to be a snow day, but it didn’t, and when I went to visit a school, and I was standing in the hallway, it just felt increasingly good, and normal,” said Stephanie Posey, District 203’s assistant superintendent for secondary education.
Chuck Freundt, the district’s assistant superintendent for elementary education, said district officials are now focused on having students back “to the fullest extent possible.”
That’s the dream for Chicago officials, who were bargaining late Friday in attempt to reach an agreement with their union that would allow elementary schools to open Monday.