By Brendan O’Brien
CHICAGO (Reuters) – Chicago teachers voted in favor of approving a tentative COVID-19 safety plan to allow the third-largest U.S. public school system to gradually resume in-person classes for students who have been out of school buildings for almost a year.
Some 67% of the members of the Chicago Teachers Union who submitted an electronic ballot on Tuesday voted in favor of the plan, which outlines safety protocols to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus in classrooms, the union said on Wednesday.
Ballots were cast after the union’s 600-member House of Delegates agreed on Monday to allow its 28,000 rank-and-file members to vote on a tentative deal.
The union’s approval allows Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to begin getting some of the system’s 355,000 students back into classrooms. The district has been teaching students remotely since the pandemic forced it to close its 513 school buildings last spring.
Some 5,200 special education and pre-kindergarten students, who opted to take some of their classes in person, could head back into the schools starting on Thursday. Another 62,000 elementary and middle school students, who took the same option, return to the classrooms starting March 1.
The district has yet to set a date for when high school students will have the option to return to classrooms.
(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and Michael Perry)
