Chicago’s Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced Monday that Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) have reached a “tentative” deal that could have teachers back in classrooms as early as this week — but the two sides have yet to agree on precisely when students might also return to in-person learning.
CPS and CTU have been at odds since early January over a plan to have most Chicago students return to classrooms on February 1st. CPS insisted that it spent hundreds of thousands readying classrooms for mid-pandemic instruction and encouraged teachers to “follow the science,” as noted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which claims returning to in-person learning is largely safe. CTU demanded that all teachers be vaccinated before CPS was allowed to reopen and that teachers who had contact with “vulnerable individuals” be allowed to work from home in perpetuity.
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