Chicago Schools Hiring People to Supervise Kids in Class While Teachers Work Remotely
The CTU is ticked off, but they have no one to blame but themselves. The kids need to go to school. They are more important.
I tried hard to word a decent headline but the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) makes it impossible.
The teachers will not return to the classroom with the students in January. So the cash-strapped city will hire supervisors to be in classes and at the school with the students.
This is because the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) refuses to get back to work.
The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) took advantage of the situation (what else is new?) to issue new demands and collective bargaining. They even blamed the pressure to reopen schools on sexism, misogyny, and racism.
No, it had nothing to do with education and a child’s mental health.
CPS provided mandates that many schools across the nation already instilled: mask requirement, the distance between desks, take temperatures, new air purifiers, better ventilation, etc.
It was not good enough for the CTU.
But parents wanted their children back in school, especially children with special needs. Those children have missed many therapy opportunities, causing them to lose any progress and engage in self-destruction.
The CTU’s demands have come back to bite them in the ass because CPS knows kids have to be in the classroom.
The Plan
CPS wants to hire 2,000 new employees to help out in the schools while teachers work remotely:
One of the primary responsibilities for half of the new positions will be student supervision, according to a job posting. That includes supervising “students who are learning in person if [the] classroom teacher is teaching remotely,” the posting says, raising questions about what in-person instruction will look like for students who return to classrooms and signaling that the district intends to forge ahead with reopening despite a potentially massive number of staff requests for medical leave.
The Chicago Sun-Times has a screenshot of the job posting.
CPS will hire 1,000 “cadre substitute” teachers, which means they have a license to teach. The hiring will give them benefits and they can become members of the CTU.
The other 1,000 new hires will earn $15 an hour and no benefits. These people will focus on COVID-19 compliance.
CPS described the job posting as an “operational necessity:”
Asked if the additional adults coming in contact with several groups posed a new health and safety risk, [CPS human resources chief Matt] Lyons said “this is one of those minimal risks that, it doesn’t present any additional danger in any way. It’s more an operational necessity.”
“All of the efforts we’re taking are layered mitigation risks,” Lyons said. “There’s a chance that if anyone who goes from classroom to classroom is COVID-positive, it’s possible they have close contact across pods and it would force certain different pods to shut down temporarily. But the likelihood versus the value to the school operations of that being the specific person is fairly low.”
CTU Whines and Cries
Of course, the move angered the CTU.
But the CTU will never realize this is not about them. It is about the kids:
Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Stacy Davis Gates said the part-time job posting was the first the union heard teachers might teach remotely to students in a classroom, a proposition she called “slightly less terrible than forcing teachers to engage in synchronous learning from unsafe buildings.” She said in a statement, however, that “hiring people into a position that barely pays minimum wage, with zero health care benefits in the middle of a pandemic, seems particularly cynical.”
“CPS can try to exploit low-wage temporary workers to fill in for staff who are not willing to sacrifice their lives for their livelihoods, when they must instead come to the table and bargain collaboratively to land what we need to return to our school buildings and our students safely — enforceable safety standards and real equity for Black and Brown school communities starved of equity for years before this pandemic,” Davis Gates said.
It seems like every other school district around the country has been able to return to the classroom or at least come to a reasonable agreement.
Why can’t CTU do the same?
Why won’t teachers speak up and defy the union? When is it enough for the teachers to stop supporting the union?
Parents have spoken out about getting their children back in the classroom. They do not do this for selfish or lazy reasons. They do not have the resources to properly educate their child. Children with special needs have to have lessons with specialists.
We are losing a generation of children with these games.
We didn’t need another example of the corruption that saturates every public sector in Chicago.
Get back to work, Chicago teachers.
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Comments
Ban public sector unions!
Suggested Headline: Chicago teachers are less essential than Walmart greeters, according to their union.
This is not new news.I have been saying to years that unions should be banned entirely from the public (governments) “work” place. The civil service is just as bad.
The biggest problem the cities, states and federal budget managers have is that unions cause unsustainable cost increases year after year for the taxpayers.
You can’t fire these people. They will not work. They will demand more and more benefits for less and less contribution to the economy. The only worse people are the politicians who write the laws we are required to follow but not them.
Money = Power. If taxpayers would unite, the politicos would not be able to get away with all of this. Join the Union of Taxpayers. Start a Chapter. United taxpayers on a national basis. We will change the dynamic. It’s not red-state / blue-state, its taxpayer and anti-taxpayer. Join now. Tell your friends.
Parler @UnionofTaxpayers
Twitter @UTaxpayers
https://unionoftaxpayers.org
Don’t need to go that far. Make state and local public sector unions just like the Federal unions (except USPS), banned from negotiating for pay and benefits and membership optional (except most Law Enforcement where union representation is banned). How many employees would willingly part with their cash with that sort of union – likely only those employees in units where the management is so bad that all the employees believe they need a union for filing grievances.
I read Second City Cop. They winge and whine about the teachers. I think their biggest unstated complaint is that the teachers have a far more nasty union.
I read it, as well. I live in the suburbs,
However, it drives me crazy when they whine about a “cold with a 99.95% survival rate” on one hand, and then scream, whine and moan when “training is rife with COVID infections”, and training must be halted.
Which is it to be? They want it both ways.
Several observations about their comment sections.
They are mostly sniveling crybabies.
About 30% of the comments are written by – apparently – former students of the CPS.
Few can express themselves without resorting to vulgarity.
Few have anything to say.
Check for symptoms at the door. Wash your hands with soap and water to control cross-contamination. Early treatments, including: HCQ cocktail, Ivermectin protocol, to mitigate progress. Oh, and don’t forget your goggles. The eyes are a window to contagion. The masks are not much better.
Postoperative wound infections and surgical face masks: a controlled study
Effectiveness of Adding a Mask Recommendation to Other Public Health Measures to Prevent SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Danish Mask Wearers
Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses
I’m not on the teacher’s side at all, but I do have a bone to pick with the parents not paying for the extra needs of special needs children. If it is your child, why should we all foot the bill?..especially those of us with no children that don’t get a tax deduction like you (doubled over for disabled children)? Parents who can afford it should definitely be footing part of that bill. It might also cut down on frivolous disability accommodation claims in K-12 and higher ed.
I think you have less of a complaint than homeschooling or private schooling parents who have to foot the bill for parents with children in public schools.
Also, the children whose education you would like to avoid contributing to will be funding your social security checks. It might be wise to avoid annoying them.
How are you sure these “special needs” students will work when they are adults?
I had a teacher tell me that 1/3 of our entire school population was “special needs”. Just another scam.
I’m not sure you’re working or adult.
Please pardon me. My response was insulting and uncalled for.
Having children with learning disabilities who were severely damaged by a government school, I have no faith that homeschooling or private schooling can be any worse for the large majority of special needs children.
In particular, placing children with ADHD in a government school is child abuse.
What percentage of CPS students are proficient in English and math?
One would think that the constant flow of stories like this would shake parents’ faith in the government monopoly bureaucratic “public” school system.
But it doesn’t. It seems to be similar to a cargo cult.
No end to the selfishness. No end.
Are you genuinely suggesting that parents FIND a teacher certified to work with (for example) an autistic child and pay them to teach that child in the child’s home? I am not aware of any tax credits for an autistic child, and even if there were they would not cover an in home teacher/therapist.
I would suggest that Chicago disband the school board and all public schools effective 01 January 2021. Cancel all contracts and issue parents of currently enrolled students checks payable to whatever private school, charter school, private tutors, etc that they name. Then the city council can duke it out in the legal system with the teachers’ union.
And as an added bonus, there will be plenty of unemployed, certified teachers available.
Simple, fire all of the Chicago Teacher union holdouts. They were the highest paid teachers in the nation. Hire 80K graduates from across the nation to replace them at half the salary and pay them relocation fees.
If the teachers really don’t want to do their job, fire them and hire someone who will.
Nothing pisses off a striking union more than union busters.
Chicago really needs to call doctor of education, jill biden;
she is a teacher of teachers,
authority doctor level, can surely mediate between the greedy lazy teachers union and chicago administrators,
it is only their children and their children’s children lives they are messing around with.
So the Chicago Teachers Union doesn’t want the schools to reopen and the teachers aren’t going to be in the classroom. Now CPS will hire 1,000 “cadre substitutes”. They will receive benefits and be able to join the CTU. Once they join the union, will they then refuse to show up in class and demand to work remotely? Makes no sense to me, but hey, it’s Chicago.
It appears that the lunacy being promoted is lost on the brain trust at CPS!
Kann den scheiß nicht erfinden.
This guy knew how to handle government workers who wouldn’t do their jobs . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc8brHWFZMY
In Washington, you can pay 900 a month to have your kid sit in the SAME classroom not being used by teachers and be remote schooled.
It’s safe for the YMCA to use that room for school aged kids at 900/month, but not schools.
…Inslee was re-elected.
You just proved how to get rid of the teachers union. PATCO them.
maybe if they were offered hazardous duty pay, they would be more inclined to attend classes!
My daughter, who teaches third grade in a suburban Detroit district, is itching to get back in the classroom. In her opinion, Google Classroom and Zoom are only 30%-35% as effective as in-classroom learning.