CHICAGO — The Chicago Teacher's Union is ready to dust off last year's protest signs and march shoulder to shoulder, chanting: "No Vaccine! No Teach!"
Since there's no telling how long a strike will last, CTU members should probably build up their stamina.
Maybe make an early morning stop at socially distant Zumba class or limber up with a hot yoga session that public health officials have allowed to reopen indoors as community spread of COVID-19 has slowed.
On the way to picket lines, Chicago teachers should probably stop by the grocery store to pick up some protest snacks stocked and sold by essential employees who have braved the unwashed masses stalking indoor aisles without missing a day of work since day one of the pandemic.
They should remember to be nice.
Those butchers, bakers and clerks — like cops, firefighters and Catholic school teachers — are the same folks that CTU negotiators are demanding their members to skip in line for coronavirus vaccine shots. It's either that, or they won't show up to work in socially distanced classrooms that a new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says aren't "associated with accelerating community transmission" of COVID-19.
Now, CTU bosses don't seem interested in scientific studies, international data or even the three weeks during which prekindergarten and clusters of special education students have attended classes without perpetuating the community spread of the coronavirus.
They'll tell you they're fighting for safety, without mentioning how negotiations continually get encumbered with demands to forward their political agenda.
And that could make the coronavirus teacher's strike of 2021 a lengthy one.
So safety conscious teachers better bundle up. It's going to be cold out there when CTU boss Jesse Sharkey and right-hand agitator-in-chief Stacey Davis Gates deliver venomous speeches about what they're fighting for — which, according to written coronavirus bargaining demands, includes that school officials must join them in lobbying for "defunding police" and "rent abatement," or in-person learning will remain a no-go as far as they're concerned.
Thankfully for striking teachers, public health officials monitoring coronavirus risk have restored some indoor dining. Protesting teachers can take a picket line break to warm up with a bowl of soup inside a neighborhood sandwich shop — at least the ones that survived state-mandated lockdowns — served up by masked waitstaff hoping for fuller tip jars.
Restaurant workers I know say they're glad to be back at work, protecting themselves and their livelihood by following public health guidance that makes life feel a little more normal.
But for public school union members, it's not worth the risk to work indoors with kids and coworkers who undergo daily health screenings in a setting with safety protocols and protective gear as nurses, cops, firefighters, nursing home staff and so many others best described as essential have during the coronavirus crisis.
Experts say that remote learning and being sequestered from schoolmates has a profound negative effect on kids and their families. Mayor Lori Lightfoot says her push to offer families the ability to choose whether to send kids to school — an option the Illinois State Board of Education says is offered to 75 percent of school districts across the state — is in response to stunted student learning in virtual classrooms.
In Chicago, the nearly 20 percent absenteeism rate for minority students in poor neighborhoods and the sharp increase in failing grades doesn't tell the whole story of the negative effect of prolonged remote learning. In the worst cases, virtual classrooms have become crime scenes, including allegations of sexual assault. And recent crime statistics suggest there might be an increase in school kids opting for in-person lessons in vehicular hijacking and gunplay taught by volunteer neighborhood criminals.
Chicago public schools, like the city itself, have never felt completely safe for students or staff. The coronavirus crisis is no different. During a global pandemic, experts say the best a school system can do is establish safety protocols that aim to prevent in-person learning from contributing to a spike in coronavirus spread in communities. And Chicago Public Schools leaders have done that by investing more than $100 million in coronavirus safety measures and teaming with public health experts to develop protocols for handling potential outbreaks. There's even modest evidence that the efforts have worked. Over the last three weeks, prekindergarten and clusters of special education students have returned to school buildings without creating a surge in coronavirus cases.
People all over Chicago are doing their best to navigate their way through the coronavirus risks from which only the privileged few who can afford to voluntarily sequester themselves. That's simply not an option for many Chicago families with school-aged kids. They protect themselves by following public health guidance while working public-facing jobs for minimum wage, working at meatpacking plants and factories and, in the ultimate irony, teaching kids at private schools.
Chicago Teachers Union officials want us to believe they're on an ethical high ground when what they've done is turn the coronavirus crisis into an opportunity to gain bargaining power.
A year after going on strike in 2019 for a five-year contract, flush with a 16 percent pay hike, they're ready to walk a picket line unless the school district caves in to their demands that have nothing to do with coronavirus safety, including adding dues-paying jobs to school staffing amid an economic crisis. They want CPS to agree to coronavirus metrics separate from existing benchmarks that apply to everyone else when determining when it's safe for in-person learning to resume.
CTU wants to be treated differently from other Chicagoans working through the coronavirus crisis. They claim that teachers deserve access to vaccinations ahead of first responders and essential workers who have done their jobs every day because our society needs them.
In one way, CTU leaders are right. They are unlike any other education labor union in Illinois.
With 20,000 members contributing a portion of their paychecks to fund political action committees, CTU has morphed into a political party with a built-in voting bloc and a ground game modeled after the Daley-era Democratic machine.
Only CTU is not accountable to the voters and taxpayers who fund their efforts, and they're the ones held hostage by union demands.
I hope Gov. J.B. Pritzker is watching from one of his mansions.
Because if he signs House Bill 2257 — which the state Senate recently sent to his desk — he'd contribute to the rise of a de facto political machine by giving CTU power to go on strike over things such as classroom size, staffing and the length of the school day, among other things.
Chicagoans who can't afford to send their kids to private schools will have to get used to dealing with uncertainty like the perpetual labor unrest that plagued the city during the '80s and did nothing to improve the quality of education.
Unless, that is, they decide our city's increasingly unstable public school system is just another reason to follow flocks of folks moving out of town, which U.S. Census data suggests remains the prevailing trend in Chicago.
Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series, "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN, and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots."
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