OPINION:
On Tuesday, the Chicago Teachers Union voted to refuse to work in-person starting Wednesday. The vast majority of its 25,000 members said they didn’t want to return to the classroom amid the omicron COVID-19 surge.
Let’s be clear: Closing schools during the pandemic was never about safety. It’s about not wanting to work, with the teachers unions leading the charge.
“With the rise in COVID cases it’s clear that we must double down on prevention strategies: Masking, ventilation, distancing and cleaning,” Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers tweeted on New Year’s Day. “But we must plan [for] contingencies.”
At least 3,229 schools around the country announced they were canceling in-person learning as of Monday evening, according to Burbio, an organization that tracks individual school and district websites. Public schools in Cleveland, Maryland’s Prince George’s County, Newark and Jersey City, New Jersey, and Mount Vernon, New York, have transitioned to remote learning for one week or more in January.
Schools in Atlanta and Fulton County, Georgia, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, are closed for the week. Pittsburgh shuttered a dozen individual schools because of staffing shortages. The head of New York City’s teachers union, Michael Mulgrew, wrote an open letter Sunday urging new Mayor Eric Adams to return the nation’s largest school district to remote learning.
Currently, more than a half-million students across the country have been locked out of their classrooms, and the number is rising.
Congress last March passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Act, which included $130 billion for K-12 schools. The Chicago school district received $3 billion in federal taxpayer money. Almost one year later, testing, ventilation, vaccination and staffing plans for schools shouldn’t be a concern. And yet they are.
School closures harm children and evidence shows they have no effect on — and may even increase — COVID-19 transmission rates. The New York Times this week detailed how the pandemic has upended children’s lives, with many falling behind academically and struggling to catch up, while experiencing increased levels of mental health problems, behavioral issues, suicide rates and drug abuse due to social isolation.
Moreover, “accumulating evidence shows that teachers and school staff are not at a higher risk of hospital admission or death from COVID-19 compared with other workers,” and early studies have found transmission rates from children “to be low, particularly among primary schoolchildren,” according to The BMJ, a peer-reviewed medical trade journal published by the British Medical Association. The study was skeptical that school closures reduced COVID-19 cases at all.
There’s more risk of death to children riding in a car than there is from catching COVID-19. Early evidence suggests the omicron variant is no worse for children than catching the common cold. The same holds true for vaccinated teachers.
Yet teachers unions across the country throughout the pandemic have been working hard not to work, advocating for themselves at the expense of the children.
Although the administration has spoken of the “deleterious effects” of keeping students out of the classroom and is advocating for in-person learning, President Biden counts on the teachers unions as a key constituency, even quipping on Labor Day that he “sleeps with an NEA member every night” — first lady Jill Biden. Mr. Biden received more money from teachers unions than any other candidate in 2020, collecting more than $232,000 from the National Education Association and AFT.
In February, the unions demanded all teachers must be vaccinated before returning to work, despite repeated comments from CDC Director Rochelle Walensky that schools could open without teachers being vaccinated. Many states bumped teachers up to the front of the vaccination line to expedite classroom reopenings.
Last May, Ms. Weingarten offered language to the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention for use in its school reopening guidelines, preceding the federal agency’s decision to put the brakes on a full reopening of in-person classrooms. Now, teachers unions are arguing that to return to work they need all of their students to test negative for the virus — amid a severe national testing shortage. It’s an impossible hurdle, and the unions know it.
California is sending 6 million rapid tests to schools and New York 3.5 million, with 2 million to test schools in New York City alone. Connecticut is sending 2 million tests to schools and Massachusetts more than 227,000.
“While these numbers are large, they are nowhere near enough to test everyone multiple times a week, which is the protocol adopted at some workplaces and private schools,” NPR reported Monday.
The teachers unions understand this, know the president won’t use his bully pulpit to push back, and will continue to use COVID-19 as an excuse not to work — the interests of the children be damned.
For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor at The Washington Times.
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