The city’s teachers union approved a deal that would send a first wave of students back to classrooms this week.
Maggie Owens’s 4-year-old daughter was pounding on the back door, desperate to go to school.
Her daughter, Louise, a special-needs student with a brain disorder, was one of the first Chicago schoolchildren able to return to her classroom last month. But then, two and a half weeks into the district’s phased reopening plan, a clash between the city and its teachers’ union forced everyone back to remote learning, and Ms. Owens told Louise that she would have to return to learning on the computer.
“She just lost it. She started crying,” Ms. Owens recalled, adding, “She had gotten into a routine, she was happy, and then we just ripped it way from her.”
After a nearly two-week pause of in-person instruction, the Chicago Teachers Union announced early Wednesday that its members had approved an agreement with the city to reopen schools. More than 20,000 ballots were cast: 13,681 members voted in favor and 6,585 voted against, the union said.
The deal allows for all students in prekindergarten through eighth grade, plus some high school students with disabilities, to return to schools over the coming weeks.
“This plan is not what any of us deserve,” Jesse Sharkey, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, said in a statement. “This agreement represents where we should have started months ago, not where this has landed.”
“We will protect ourselves by using the school Safety Committees created under this agreement to organize and see that CPS meets safety standards and mitigation protocols,” Mr. Sharkey said. “Safety Committees will enforce this agreement, have access to information and the ability to change unsafe practices in their school.”
After the deal was announced on Sunday, Ms. Owens, who lives on the city’s far Northwest Side, said she was pleased but that she was also frustrated with both the district and the union for letting the conflict escalate into a crisis.
“I feel like what’s being lost in it is, there’s real people and real kids that are being harmed by this,” she said. “And I feel like my daughter is one of them.”
As part of the agreement, the city committed to offering 2,000 coronavirus vaccine doses this week to staff members in classrooms that were set to reopen on Thursday and any other employees who live with people who were at high risk from the virus. It would then provide 1,500 doses a week to school staff in the weeks after that.
Teachers who have no students attending in-person classes could continue to teach remotely, and unvaccinated teachers could take unpaid leaves of absence for the next quarter instead of teaching in person. The agreement also set thresholds for what would lead the district, as well as individual schools or classrooms, to temporarily revert to distance learning.
A similar battle was playing out on Monday in Philadelphia, where teachers conducted remote learning in the cold outside dozens of school buildings to protest what the union has called an unsafe reopening plan.
Philadelphia is scheduled to bring prekindergarten through second grade students back to schools on Feb. 22, and teachers in those grades were originally supposed to report to buildings on Monday. But the local union had instructed them to remain at home, setting up a showdown.
At the last minute, Mayor Jim Kenney said teachers did not have to work in person while a mediator reviewed the district’s reopening plan.
In Chicago, Willie Preston, a father of six who lives on the South Side, said his youngest daughter, Lear, who is in prekindergarten, was also caught in limbo after her school briefly reopened last month, then closed again. She was excitedly getting ready for school one morning when his wife had to break the news to her.
“She started crying and pouting about, why can’t she go to school,” Mr. Preston said. “And we had to talk to her and try to explain to her that grown-ups are fighting about whether she gets to go back to school or not.”
He said he had not yet told Lear that she would most likely be able to go back to school on Thursday, in case the union voted against the deal and the district was thrown into chaos again.
“For my wife and I, one of the most important things for us and our children is stability,” he said. “I don’t want to do that to our 4-year-old until I have a high degree of certainty that she’ll be in fact going back.”
Ellen Almer Durston and Derrick Bryson Taylor contributed reporting.
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