CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- A Chicago charter school closed Tuesday and put students on remote learning following positive COVID-19 cases, and the teachers union is critical of a lack of testing, which it calls a failure.
Acero Schools closed its Zizumbo campus in the Archer Heights neighborhood for two weeks - affecting nearly 600 K-8 students unable to be vaccinated. This comes after the school hit a metric that’s part of an agreement with the Chicago Teachers Union: three students or more testing positive in three or more classrooms.
The actual numbers weren’t given.
“Because there is no clear indication of the origin of the confirmed cases and because the number of cases affects three individuals or more within three or more classrooms over a fourteen day period, we are following the recommendation by the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) to temporarily close school for two weeks in order to prevent further spread within the community,” school administrators wrote in an email to families Monday evening.
About 6,000 students are in quarantine.
This, as the teacher’s union is highly critical of COVID-19 testing and contact tracing system-wide.
"We are deeply concerned about the absolute inadequacy of the COVID-19 testing program," said Thad Goodchild, the CTU’s Deputy General Counsel.
"Instead of creating an opt-out COVID-19 testing program, CPS is only testing students whose parents have affirmatively provided written consent for them to participate. And CPS' efforts to obtain consent from parents has been an abject failure."
He said there’s been consent for 9,000 out of 340,000 students. Goodchild added that CPS has only been testing 3 percent of students, and just over 600 students were tested on Monday.
"This is the third week of the school year and CPS has only 3 percent of students participating in its COVID-19 testing program. They only administered 638 tests across the district. That is complete madness," Goodchild said.
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