Chicago Public Schools is ready to welcome students back for in-person learning Monday amid a “major surge” in city COVID-19 cases, school and health officials said, as the Chicago Teachers Union called on the district to add more safety measures, including a requirement that staff members and students test negative for COVID-19 before the end of winter break.
“I feel very comfortable with us starting on the 3rd,” CPS CEO Pedro Martinez said at a news conference Thursday.
“We are going to respond to the data. So as we see cases rising, as we see them in the schools, you will see more classrooms transition to remote (learning). That is actually a more conservative approach than almost any other large school district that I’ve seen in the country.”
Martinez expects “cases to be high” as students return from a two-week break with the city, state and country experiencing spikes. The district reported its highest daily new case count on Dec. 18, the first day of winter vacation, with 173 students and 121 adults testing positive, according to CPS data.
Martinez expressed confidence in district procedures such as indoor masking, prompt contact tracing and a weekly testing program that’s voluntary for students and mandatory for unvaccinated staff members. Martinez said Thursday CPS is purchasing 2 million more masks and will provide home test kits to students. A district spokesperson later told the Tribune the kits would go to unvaccinated students exposed to the virus and any students exhibiting COVID-19 symptoms.
CPS said it handed out 150,000 home test kits in mid-December to students at 300-plus schools in communities hard hit by COVID-19 and with low vaccination rates. About 37,000 tests had been registered and received by CPS as of Thursday morning, a spokesperson said.
The district extended the Tuesday drop-off deadline to 5 p.m. Thursday after photos surfaced of some shipping boxes overflowing with packages. CPS said tests dropped off Friday would not be processed. Kits left on sidewalks near full drop-off boxes were not damaged despite Tuesday’s wet conditions, Martinez said.
“They were in waterproof packets,” he said. “All of them were picked up. In fact, we had some of our own drivers that went out just to support. FedEx also has done additional pickups just to be ready in case there was any more risk of overflow.”
CPS said laboratory technicians are “working around the clock” to provide test results by the end of the weekend.
CTU held its own testing event Thursday it said drew more than 300 people. The union and CPS have been negotiating a safety agreement for this school year for months, with the union saying Thursday it submitted a proposal to CPS calling for staff members, students, vendors and volunteers to provide a negative test result taken 48 hours before returning to buildings; for the district to reinstate the daily health screener from the last school year; and for an individual school to shift to remote learning when 20% of its staff is in isolation or quarantine or a school safety committee determines a transition is warranted, among other demands.
CTU is asking the district to pause in-person learning for 14 days to put these protocols in place.
“If those mitigations aren’t in place by Monday to protect our educators, students and families, we predict chaos,” CTU President Jesse Sharkey said in a statement. “We have already dealt with inadequate staffing since the beginning of the school year, including a desperate lack of substitute teachers. This failure to plan and adequately protect our school communities will only make this situation worse.”
For months, the union has demanded CPS provide a health metric that would spell out when a school or the district would need to go remote. CTU said the city is now meeting the metric from its early 2021 agreement that would require a 14-day shift to e-learning. That agreement, reached after weeks of tense negotiations, paved the way for students to come back to campuses in waves during the last school year.
CTU has its own agreement with charter school operators. Some Chicago International Charter School locations announced on social media that students will engage in remote learning starting Monday, and a negative coronavirus test must be submitted before returning to buildings. A CICS representative was not immediately available for comment.
In its Thursday statement, the union also pointed to Washington, D.C., public schools, where officials are requiring a negative COVID-19 test for every student and staff member heading back to classrooms.
When asked about CTU’s proposal, Martinez pointed to the at-home test kit initiative and the district’s weekly testing program. More than 33,000 tests were administered the last week of school before winter break, with nearly 900 people testing positive, according to district data. The 2.7% positivity rate was the highest since CPS kicked off the testing program in September with much difficulty.
Nearly 42,000 students and about 25,000 staff members are registered for the program, a district spokesperson said.
CPS says about 91% of its staff is fully vaccinated. Martinez said the district is “not seeing any signs that absenteeism will be any higher than normal.” Fully vaccinated, asymptomatic CPS staff and students exposed to COVID-19 are not required to quarantine.
At Thursday’s news conference, Martinez and city public health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady reiterated kids belong in schools.
“There’s no evidence that we know they’ve shown us that shutting down a district, especially when the rest of the city is open, that that somehow reduces spread,” Martinez said.
Chicago is reporting about 570 child COVID-19 cases per day on average, with about five kids hospitalized per day. Some 51% of CPS students 12 to 17 years old and nearly 12% of students 5 to 11 are fully vaccinated, a spokesperson said. About 330,000 students are enrolled in CPS, the nation’s third-largest school district.
