Students in Chicago protest for remote teaching and better corona protection measures in schools.
Foto: SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA
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“The situation is out of control,” is the title of a viral post by a New York student on the online platform Reddit, which was shared by tens of thousands of people. In it he describes his current everyday school life and gives an insight into the situation in the public schools in the largest city in the USA. The long distance learning in recent months has also given him mental problems, but the current omicron wave makes a “temporary return to remote learning necessary,” JoshGordons_burner begins his report.
He writes of sick teachers absent and children alone in classrooms; Hours where no learning takes place, only attendance is checked at the beginning; of several hours where tests are handed out because students are contact persons to infected people; of a crowded auditorium where students panic and run away from a student who tests positive; of half-empty classes because many parents keep children at home or because they are infected and of Covid as a dominant topic in 90 percent of conversations among students present.
New York students protested against these conditions on Tuesday with a kind of school strike, a “walkout”. In particular, videos from Brooklyn Tech – a state high school for the gifted and the largest school in the country, where 6,000 students are usually highly motivated to study together on seven floors – spread rapidly on social media. But there were also protests at a dozen other schools in New York City. “Our schools are not safe right now, there are just so many people who are sick, our mayor is not protecting us enough, we want the option to learn remotely,” said student and school strike organizer Felicia from the Bronx Science High School.
Like many other Democrat politicians across the country, New York Mayor Eric Adams wants to keep schools open – apparently at almost any price. The US schools, which are open despite dramatic corona numbers, are increasingly becoming purely dysfunctional detention centers these days due to high levels of sick leave among teachers, as the report by JoshGordons_burner shows. Across the country, well-earning commentators on liberal cable television MSNBC and CNN have been vociferously worried from the safety of their couches or desks in the past few days about possible backlogs of poor students in particular due to remote learning – even if they didn’t care much before the pandemic looked after the welfare of the students.
The reason for the sharp rhetoric of the TV know-it-alls was the debate about corona protection measures in Chicago. There, the well-organized local teachers’ union CTU had launched a seven-day virtual strike in the face of sluggish negotiations with the school authorities and Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Because of the high number of infections in the city, CTU called for more tests and better protective equipment such as masks, as well as set limits for switching to distance learning again. This should happen when there is a positive rate of 30 percent among the children, or when more than a quarter of all teachers are absent due to corona infection.
The dispute also revealed that the Illinois governor had offered the city government additional masks and tests, but the city of Chicago had not responded. Agreement was reached on Monday, seven days after union members voted to stop working and the school board canceled classes for seven days. Classes have been running again since Wednesday. Details of the compromise found are not yet known.
But even if the dispute in Chicago was particularly bitter: many other parts of the country are facing the same problem these days or have already gone back to remote teaching because of the omicron wave. According to a count by the “Burbio” portal, there were more schools in the USA in the last two weeks without normal classes than in the whole of 2021. There were over 5,000 in the first week of January, over 3,000 this week. In Detroit, for example, all schools are in remote mode because the positive rate for corona tests citywide is around 40 percent.
The student protests in New York could be the beginning of further conflicts about adequate safety precautions in schools in the pandemic – or their preliminary climax. There are also rumblings in other areas of society. On Thursday, members of the largest US nurses’ union, National Nurses United, will protest nationwide for better occupational safety – and, for example, against a shortened quarantine in the event of infection. The head of the flight attendant union AFA-CWA, Sara Nelson, received a cease and desist letter from the Delta airline because she had reported on Twitter that colleagues were being forced to return to work despite a corona infection and fever.
The White House said on Wednesday it would provide 5 million additional Covid tests to schools across the country so they can stay open. The informal leader of the US left, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, called on Wednesday for the White House to provide all citizens with an N95 mask. To do this, it should use the Defense Production Act from World War II to oblige companies to increase their production. Sanders had also previously called for a significant increase in the number and simpler allocation of the 500 million corona tests that the Biden government pledged in December.
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