“Public pensions, which are funded by taxpayers and state workers, are supposed to be the most transparent of all pensions. State Freedom of Information Acts are supposed to ensure public scrutiny of these trillions of public monies. “

A police source said some officers welcome a positive COVID-19 test result and the required time off because of the department‘s canceling or restricting days off and instituting mandatory 12-hour shifts.

“What if I lost my job because I couldn’t go to work today?” said Hilliary Herod, whose three children attend Henry Clay Elementary in Hegewisch. “If Illinois has no pandemic unemployment, what are parents supposed to do? I don’t think CPS understands that. I don’t think CTU understands that. I don’t think they care.”

“Chicago faces major, complex, interwoven problems. They’re not all the fault of the city. And they are not without solutions: In fact, this city has plenty of smart people engaged with them… There is no shortage of decent ideas; the issue is who is listening to the best minds in town. But the danger now is that the present-day problems in Chicago are becoming so intense, so public and so all-consuming that the bandwidth of our leaders will be filled up with panicked crisis management, and we’ll fail to plan quickly enough for the recovery.”

Testing remains one of the union’s most significant concerns as it relates to students’ return to in-person learning. CTU members believe two weeks of remote learning would not only limit exposure amid the wave but help both city school leaders and union heads formulate a better plan moving forward.

“I don’t want to make light of the fact that there are children being hospitalized, but only 15% of the kids in Chicago hospitals today have COVID-19 and the other 85% have other illnesses,” Dr. Allison Arwady said. “We don’t upend school, we don’t stop for influenza.”

“We have no sympathy for the unvaccinated. Actually we have contempt for them and we don’t want them sitting near us coughing on our popcorn at the Lake Theatre.”

“What these children and their families have suffered at the hands of the leaders of this broken political system that runs broken government schools is morally indefensible. And as CTU pushes for remote learning that has already failed the kids, many at-risk teenagers, when they’re not out carjacking, are left alone to be slaughtered in Chicago’s street gang wars.”

“To understand the crisis that shuttered Chicago public schools this week, it helps to know the key ingredient: A Democratic mayor and one of the city’s most powerful labor groups can’t stand each other. An increasingly toxic relationship between the Chicago Teachers Union and Mayor Lori Lightfoot has been waiting to explode for months — if not years. The Omicron variant turned out to be the spark.”

Mark Konkol: “The real-life standoff between CTU and City Hall doesn’t just defy logic and science… It also is evidence Illinois’ status-quo political class places more value in the support and financial backing of a public employee union over what public health officials and ‘science and data’ say is best for children at this moment in the coronavirus crisis.”

The woman ran to the school’s front office, which called police. The woman was not hurt, and the students and staff were inside the school at the time, according to a notice sent to parents.

The political scandal of the year so far is unfolding in plain sight in Chicago, where the teachers union has effectively shut down the public schools.

“If their long game is to have a great city that all of us can thrive in, why do they keep doing this in a way that disrespects families, takes away from our families their choice and creates chaos in a system?” Mayor Lori Lightfoot said of the CTU leadership. “That is not a long term winning solution. That’s on them. Not on me.”

“I think as many have said, one death from COVID is one death too many. However, I think at this point in the pandemic, the kids are really what we need to be focusing on and keeping them in school and keeping them engaged,” one mother said. “You know, here in Chicago, we have such a big district, and it’s a complex district. And I understand that. But I think we need to get creative as to how to keep the kids in school. And unfortunately, that’s just not happening.”

Most owners of Chicago-area midsize businesses will pay their workers more this year, and nearly half will give employees more flexibility to work remotely as finding and retaining labor shapes as their top challenge. In the Chicago subset of a national survey, 67% already have increased wages or plan to in 2022. About 43% are offering workers more options on where they do their jobs.

The city has filed an unfair labor practices complaint over a union vote to switch to remote learning. The mayor explained, “We’d rather resolve this at the bargaining table. We are considering all of our options, and we’ll make a determination shortly as to what levers we’re going to pull, depending on whether or not we make significant progress at the bargaining table.”

“But now, it seems, the CTU’s default reaction to disagreement with the district is to go right to the nuclear option: Voting not to show up to work, as 73% of union members did late Tuesday night after CPS refused to switch to remote learning districtwide…Unless CPS and CTU can work together as partners, creating a school system that the city can believe in and wholeheartedly support, Chicago has a bleak future indeed.”