"We have been disrespected at the table and the Board of Education won't bargain." Interview with Kenzo Shibata of CTU.

by Lia Russell

Source: Chicago Teachers Union Facebook page.

Kenzo Shibata is a high school teacher and the Functional Vice President for High Schools of the Chicago Teachers Union. This interview was conducted by Lia Russell on February 1st, 2021 and has been edited for length and clarity.

Strikewave (SW): To start, tell us what's going on with the Chicago Teachers Union and school reopenings.

Kenzo Shibata (KS): As background, the Chicago Board of Education is run by the mayor of Chicago. In 1995, the Illinois State Legislature gave complete control of the schools to the mayor of Chicago and the mayor has the power to appoint the entire Board of Education.

So, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot maintained last spring that we would be doing in-person schooling, through the pandemic. It was actually the Governor, JB Pritzker, who stepped in and shut down the schools across the entire state, and he overrode Lightfoot. After that, from last spring through the end of the school year, we launched into distance learning. It wasn't very structured and it definitely wasn't ideal, but it was the safest possible thing to do for students and teachers. Afterwards, over the summer, we demanded meetings with the Board of Education and the mayor, to negotiate what a reopening plan would look like in the coming school year. 

Because Chicago does not have a school board that is accountable to the communities that have to live with these decisions, the mayor gets to hand down decrees to the CEO of Chicago Public Schools. In fact, in that 1995 law, they made it so that we had a CEO instead of a superintendent. The difference between these two positions is that a CEO doesn't have to have an educator license and a superintendent does, though we currently have a CEO who does: Janice Jackson. But what happened over the summer was, at the last second, the Board of Education issued this plan that was just a no-go from the very start. 

There wasn't any kind of promise of sufficient cleaning, or proper protective gear for teachers. Social distancing would not be able to be maintained. As people that work in the schools, we said to CPS this plan is not going to work, but work with us and we'll find a way to make it happen after improvements. And the Board just maintained that this was going to be the plan. By the end of the summer, we decided to meet and discuss whether or not to go out on strike in our union’s House of Delegates. Just calling that meeting forced the hand of the Board of Education to go to distance learning last semester. Every few months, we would get some notice that they're thinking about opening the schools, and now they unveiled this plan they're trying to phase in elementary school teachers. 

The initial deadline to have our pre-K through eighth grade teachers back to in-person education was last week. The course of action that CTU voted for was to continue distance learning, and if the Board of Education were to lock us out of Google Classroom, which is how we connect with our students, we'd go on strike. 

The Board of Education delayed the reopening of schools by a couple of days, then they delayed it again. The deadline is today, with the Board of Education ordering that pre-K through eighth grade teachers report back to their buildings today, and then teach remotely from their buildings to their students. Tomorrow, on Tuesday, they expect to bring students back into the building. Already, because some of the schools have been opened, there have been a number of teachers who've been locked out. And that's why we have a strike fund, so we'll have something to live on. 

Some of those who have been locked out are actually paraprofessionals, who get paid very little compared to teachers. So we're hoping to help them remain out, working distance throughout this pandemic. We're kind of just waiting on the board right now. If they were to lock out more teachers, or if they lock out everyone as they have threatened, then we may be going on strike tomorrow or within the next few days.

Because the mayor and the board have been immovable on the idea of schools opening right away, there has been no real movement at the negotiating table. Even just on a logistical standpoint, if we were to open up schools, teachers, or, ideally, some sort of cleaning professionals should be going into the schools to make sure that the facilities are set up and clean for a safe opening. But the board is insisting that the schools have to open immediately. So we need to get to the bargaining table and have them understand the impossibility of that before we can start discussing details.

(SW): How has CPS responded to the union's attempts to bargain or negotiate reopening plans?

(KS): It’s been a repeat of the 2019 contract negotiations, where we have been disrespected at the table and the Board of Education won't bargain. We maintain that we will work around the clock to secure a deal, as we did in 2019. The Board of Education will meet, but for limited amounts of time. One thing that really struck me was yesterday, on Sunday, the day before they expected teachers to report back to school, the mayor and the CEO (Janice Jackson) didn't show up to bargaining with union officers. Instead, they did the Sunday morning news talk shows. And that was just a repeat of 2019, when they would gaslight us in the media by saying, “We're not arguing, we’re bargaining in good faith,” but then wouldn't even show up at the table. So it's been a campaign of misinformation on their end and it's been disheartening. 

The only thing that has been able to cut through that has been solidarity and the fact that we have a lot of parents on our side.The majority of parents are not sending their kids to in-person school. Eighty percent of them opted out of that, and that number keeps climbing because parents are seeing the conditions of these schools. They are pulling their kids out left and right. My wife is a room parent, and she's on the local school council. She has been on the phone organizing parents, because there were a number of students whose parents had decided to register for in-person learning. So she talked to them, answered all their questions, and her fellow parents understood that it was not safe.

So right now, there's one student in my son’s class that's attending in-person. The other fifteen are learning remotely. And his poor teacher, who now has to teach one kid wearing a mask behind plastic and to a webcam for the rest of the class, should not have to do this.

(SW): What has the response been from other people who are impacted by the school system and school reopenings, like, non-teaching staff and parents to the demands the union is seeking to be met?

(KS): The fact that only 20% of parents signed up for in-person instruction is pretty telling. And if you look at the breakdown of the parents who are actually registering their kids to in-person schooling, they tend to be white and middle class or upper middle class. Those are communities that are not as impacted by COVID as Black and Brown communities, as working class communities, as poor communities.

The first person in my life that I lost to COVID was a former student of mine.

(SW): I’m sorry for your loss. 

(KS): Thank you. His name was Carl. He was a young man, thirty-one years old. I was kind of a mentor to him. He was one of the first students I taught. After graduation, we’d email each other maybe a couple times a year to catch up. And then I got a call from another of his teachers that he had died of COVID. This was within the first two weeks of the lockdowns and everything. And I am worried that we're going to see a spike of COVID cases in the families who send their students back into the schools. That isn't good for anybody, more cases while we have a vaccine on the horizon.

(SW): How has CPS handled underlying health conditions, for teachers who might be more at risk? 

(KS): My wife has Stage IV breast cancer, and I immediately filed for an ADA exception because she's immunocompromised. I thought that would be kind of a no-brainer for the board, considering distance learning is something that we have already been doing and this is a serious condition. And initially, I was denied. So I decided to tweet out a picture of my denial letter. It went viral, it got a lot of retweets, and then maybe a day or two later, a follow-up letter saying that I will not be required to teach in-person arrived. That's great but that's how the boss works. They like to pick us off like that one by one. I'm maintaining that even if I am not required to go in-person, I'm gonna strike with my sisters and brothers who are if it comes down to it.

(SW): Is there a disparity in Chicago between teachers who are excused from going into the classroom and those who are expected to go like it? Does it cut along racial or class divides?

(KS): It's interesting, because initially it seemed every request was rejected. Everyone I talked to, no matter what the condition was, had been rejected. Then CPS started to amend the conditions. And, you know, things like hypertension and diabetes, which are disproportionately prevalent in Black communities, put those with them at heightened risk from COVID. We don’t have the data now, and I can only speculate what we're going to see, but I think there will be disparate impacts on our Black teachers and older teachers, who have these conditions in higher numbers.

(SW): What do you make of the mayor saying that she has, “labor peace with every single [union], except two. The right-wing leadership of the Fraternal Order of Police and this union [CTU]. It makes no sense. We can get a deal done.”

(KS): This is rich coming from a mayor who has opposed the movement for police accountability -- the coalition of which CTU is a vocal member.

(SW): How has the vaccine roll out been for teachers in Chicago?

(KS): That's another concern that we have. Why don't we just wait until a majority of teachers are vaccinated, and then we can start a conversation about in-person schooling, considering the vaccine is here and just hasn’t yet been distributed. The way it's been distributed, by the way, has been a mess. They’ve been distributing it through local pharmacies and it’s like trying to buy concert tickets after all the scalpers have bought them up. A few teachers I know have been able to get their first doses, but through the private market. CPS says it has a plan and by mid-February they will start administering first shots to teachers. So why not wait a couple of months for us to be vaccinated to force us back into classrooms? Why open the schools before everyone is safe?

Editor’s note: After a day of bargaining on Monday, CPS CEO Janice Jackson and Mayor Lightfoot agreed to continue negotiations with CTU and to not lock educators out of the platforms they teach Chicago’s students on. At the time of publication, no agreement has yet been reached.

Lia Russell is a freelance writer based in New York City and a member of the Strikewave editorial collective. More work can be found at liaruss.com or on Twitter @liaoffleash.