Following “substantial progress” in negotiations between Chicago’s public schools and the Chicago Teachers Union on Monday, it has been announced that teachers will not be left out of Google Suite on Monday evening, and that e-learning will continue. for students at least for the next two days.
According to a CPS email, students will have a remote learning on Tuesday and Wednesday as negotiations continue, for the time being blocking teachers off the table.
“We have reached another important milestone today in our efforts to provide face-to-face learning to our students in the Chicago public school system,” said Mayor Lori Lightfoot and CPS Director, Dr. Janice Jackson, in a statement. “We have reached an agreement on another open issue and made substantial progress in a framework that we hope will address the rest of the issues. We call for a 48-hour refresh period which we hope will lead to a final resolution on all open issues.” .
The news comes after an ultimatum issued Sunday by Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said CPS would be willing to “take action” if teachers did not show up in their classrooms Monday.
Amid the often tense negotiations, teachers had voted in January to return to remote learning, even with pre-school and cluster students already returning to classrooms. This vote was done in response to CPS asking teachers to return to K-8 classrooms on January 25, and students to return to these classrooms on February 1st.
CPS officials said over the weekend that if teachers did not return to schools on Monday, they would be considered “absent without permission” and would not be allowed to conduct remote learning until they return to their classrooms.
“All teachers, pre-K up to eight years old and cluster teachers must report,” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said at a news conference Sunday. “If you do not have approved accommodation, we hope to return to class. Those who do not show up for work … we will have to take action. We avoid that. “
At a virtual press conference on Sunday afternoon, CTU leadership said outstanding issues include a clear vaccination process and a health metric for teachers ’coronavirus concerns.
“People’s lives … it depends on us getting maximum security in the midst of a pandemic,” said Stacy Davis Gates, vice president of CTU.
Both sides pointed their fingers at a series of posts on social media earlier Sunday, and CTU officials said Lightfoot and CPS leadership told them not to “attend” the negotiations unless union members would be willing to make “big concessions”
In response, CPS said CTU’s leadership “informed its negotiating team that they could not meet until they could get a response to our latest offer.”
The CTU responded to this statement by criticizing Lightfoot for “referring to the hyper-democratic” nature of the CTU “in a negative light,” and that the union is looking for its grassroots members during the current stalemate.
The news comes after both sides reported on progress in negotiations over the weekend. Both sides have been debating the safety of teachers and students returning to classrooms amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic for months, with issues related to vaccination, metrics and safety procedures at the negotiating table.
Lightfoot insists that CPS’s plan to return to schools has been thoroughly reviewed by medical experts, including Chicago Department of Public Health commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady, and has been confirmed in the charter and archbishop’s classrooms. city since the fall, as well as in the pre-K and cluster learning classrooms that returned last month.
Lightfoot appeared Monday in “Morning Joe” to make that claim and blame the union again.
“We’ve invested over $ 100 million in ventilation, other safety protocols, making sure we have masks, health safety tests, temperature controls, everything you could expect, that the CDC guidelines have told us, that we know they make sense to mitigate any problems in schools, ”he said.
“We had three weeks of safe implementation of our plan until the teachers union exploited it,” Lightfoot continued. “We’re doing our best to deal with what teachers tell us, but we need them to find us halfway. As you all know, you have to take steps in the direction of others. There has to be a commitment.”