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Vaughn High was the first Chicago school to close due to COVID-19. Today, it’s among CPS buildings that will reopen to students for the first time since March.

Chicago Tribune - 1/11/2021

When Chicago’s Vaughn Occupational High School closed in March after a classroom assistant had one of the state’s earliest known cases of COVID-19, Cindy Fah-Ok agreed that swift action was needed to protect her daughter and the other students with disabilities who take classes there.

“It seemed like the very safe thing to do, and I was grateful that we were given that advice to close,” said Fah-Ok, who was at the Portage Park school that week for a fundraising meeting and had to quarantine with her daughter Sophia.

No other staff or students fell ill, and the employee, believed to have caught the virus on a cruise ship, ultimately recovered.

But on Monday, when thousands of Chicago Public Schools students in prekindergarten and special education programs are due to return for the first time 10 months, Fah-Ok feels safer waiting a little longer.

Questions linger about how CPS will keep the building safe for teachers, Fah-Ok said, as do concerns about students who don’t have to wear masks due to medical exemptions. Her 21-year-old daughter Sophia, who has autism, is in her last year at Vaughn and doing well with the online classes, Fah-Ok said.

“I don’t want to disrupt that routine,” said Fah-Ok, of Ravenswood. “She is learning, she is focused. She is doing all that they can possibly do online, and I don’t want to toss a possible infection into the mix.”

Another parent of a child with autism said her daughter’s struggles with the changes in her routine brought by remote learning were part of the reason she needed to be back at school as soon as possible.

Ebonie Davis said her 6-year-old daughter Layla, who is due to return to Thorp Elementary in South Chicago on Monday, didn’t want to engage in online classes and has been receiving less speech and occupational therapy during remote learning.

“She wasn’t doing well at all, in my eyes, virtually and remotely,” Davis said. “... With the type of autism that she has, it was very difficult for her to sit in front of a computer for the amount of time that was required.”

Sometimes, Davis said, that has led to Layla throwing her laptop or exhibiting other behavioral problems that are “more intense” than usual.

Yet for the minority of CPS parents who like Davis are choosing to send their children back, there is already uncertainty around how long schools will stay open again, with the possibility of a teachers strike unless the Chicago Teachers Union and the district come to an agreement. The two sides are still bargaining but have appeared far apart on key issues such as forcing teachers to work in person before they have vaccines.

“I am growing weary of this expectation that our union has to go on strike in order to get a safe reopening plan,” said CTU Vice President Stacy Davis Gates.

Thousands of staff members were called back to schools last week to prepare for students, and nearly half the teachers didn’t show up each day. After CPS CEO Janice Jackson said staff who attempt to continue working remotely on Monday will be considered absent without leave and docked pay, the union’s lawyer questioned the legality of that position.

Shavon Coleman, a prekindergarten teacher assistant at Lawndale Community Academy, said she felt bullied.

“Because you act like you’re giving me an option when you send me a survey with choices, with options. But then you tell me that I don’t have an option,” Coleman said. “We are not games. We are not meant to be played with. This is real life, and if they would value peoples’ lives more than they would value a dollar, we would truly not be in this situation.”

Coleman said four family members have had COVID-19, beginning with her 6-year-old nephew, and that two are hospitalized in intensive care.

“If they don’t think that that’s enough of a reason to not open schools, then that’s more than heartless,” Coleman said. “The fact that they sent out these surveys but they aren’t listening to them, that’s what does it for me.”

Davis Gates referenced a CTU proposal to make returning voluntary until teachers have at least the first dose of the vaccine, and to consider extending the school year.

At Vaughn, a minority of students — just 18% of the 215 who attend — have indicated they plan to return Monday for in-person classes, according to CPS data. And in late December, Vaughn’s Local School Council unanimously passed a resolution calling for remote learning to continue until parents, students, staff and administrators agree it’s safe.

Such resolutions are nonbinding but have been adopted by more than two dozen school councils in recent weeks.

While Vaughn students who return Monday may notice their halls are unusually empty, students at other schools may find themselves without classmates at all.

When intent-to-return forms were due in December, seven schools had only one student in the first wave choose in-person learning, and at two dozen schools, only two students opted in.

Then there are schools where a majority of eligible students said they wanted to return. Vick Early Childhood and Family Center in Marquette Park had the highest number of students opting in, 176, about two-thirds of those who had the option. Stock School in Edison Park had the second most, 171, about 80% of those eligible. Beard Elementary in Norwood Park had the third most, 110, for 56%.

All three of those schools have higher percentages of white students and lower percentages of students from low-income households than the district overall, which tracks with the citywide intent-to-return responses.

Among elementary school families, 31% of Latino students, 33% of Asian students, 34% of Black students and 67.5% of white students chose in-person learning, which means students returning to classrooms Monday are not an accurate representation of CPS enrollment.

Just as union and district leaders have different ideas about what it means to safely reopen a school and which research should guide such decisions, their views differ on which reopening data is most important to consider in the name of equity.

The union has focused on the disproportionate percentage of white students planning to return, while CPS leaders have stressed that the majority are still Black or Latino, two demographic groups that the district has particularly struggled to reach through remote learning.

Not all schools, however, followed the citywide trends. At Thorp, a majority Black school, half the students opted in.

Davis, the Thorp parent whose first grade daughter Layla will board a bus from her day care Monday morning for the school’s first day of in-person classes since March, said she is not worried about health risks posed by the coronavirus, in part because Layla is now accustomed to wearing a mask.

But Layla’s sister, who is in a general education program, has been doing well with remote learning and will continue even after she is eligible to go back. Most remaining elementary students are scheduled to return on Feb. 1 for families that choose in-person schooling.

About 61% of Thorp prekindergartners and about 42% of special education cluster program students are returning, according to Davis, who is the Local School Council vice president and said many families include essential workers.

Yet Heather Debby, a seventh grade English teacher at Disney II Magnet in Old Irving Park, said her twin 4-year-old daughters are returning to their preschool Monday only because she and her husband, also a CPS educator, won’t have child care options when they are required to start in-person work with the second wave later this month.

They considered hiring someone to watch the twins during the school day, but didn’t want to bring a stranger into the home during a pandemic and can’t drive the girls to their grandmother’s Schaumburg home every day for supervision, she said.

“I’ve seen a lot of rhetoric about choice and offering parents choices, but I feel ... in order to offer other parents choice, (teachers) don’t have as much,” Debby said.

Most CPS employees who asked to continue remote working due to child care challenges were denied, according to district data for the first group of teachers set to return. The district granted only 11.5% of 513 such requests.

In total, only 42.8% of the first wave of returning teachers who applied for accommodations saw their requests granted, though the district said it is working to approve more employees who also serve as primary caregivers.

The district has not yet released data for the remaining teachers ordered back to work this month.

CPS has come a long way since that first case at Vaughn, the sixth in the state, when families began clamoring for information about cases in their schools as the virus spread exponentially. CPS now publishes data, updated weekly, showing the number of cases tied to each school.

Since last spring, with limited staff members reporting to school buildings, nearly 650 cases have been tied to schools. Most have been isolated, but this quarter has seen at least a dozen schools with four or more cases.

Many staff members and families are not satisfied with the district’s response to these cases, and think stricter measures are needed to mitigate potential exposure at schools. Statewide, schools have consistently been near the top the list of “potential exposure locations,” where known cases of COVID-19 could have been transmitted. In Illinois, there are five reported school outbreaks of five to 10 cases.

CPS students on Monday are returning to rooms with one HEPA purifier if they have functioning mechanical ventilation, or two filters if the room doesn’t have functioning mechanical ventilation and is larger than 500 square feet, the district has said. For the most part, students will wear masks except during lunch and stay with pods to limit contact. But some students will have medical exemptions that allow them to go mask-free.

Josh Radinsky, a member of Vaughn’s Local School Council, said the district hasn’t responded to various questions and concerns raised by community members, and parents recently learned that some returning students won’t be wearing masks because of exemptions. While those students should be accommodated, that creates safety hazards for other students and staff, he said.

Radinsky, whose son graduated from Vaughn last year, said he worries the district is ill-prepared to invite students back, with critical information only being shared at the last minute.

“The last thing in the world that we want is for any student to be discriminated against because of their disability, because we’ve all raised kids with disabilities and we know how hard that road is, but the district has to have a plan,” Radinsky said.

echerney@chicagotribune.com

hleone@chicagotribune.com

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