(KMOX/AP) - Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker orders all schools to remain closed for the remainder of the academic school year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He made the announcement Friday at his daily press conference.
Pritzker announced the action during his daily briefing in Chicago, extending school closures past the April 30 date he had set earlier. As of Thursday, Illinois had recorded 25,733 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 1,072 deaths blamed on the disease caused by the coronavirus.
Illinois joins 27 states, including Missouri that have ordered or recommended school building closures for the rest of the academic year.
Missouri Gov. Mike Parson made the same decision on April 9.
Parson says the state will be working with local districts to have commencement ceremonies sometime this year.
Last month, Gov. Pritzker ordered all K-12 schools to close starting March 17 to avoid the spread of coronavirus. The order originally was to in place through March 30, but with the Governor extending the stay-at-home order through April 30, schools remained closed, reports WBBM.
In recent weeks, schools have attempted instruction through internet-based assignments, or “e-learning.” But not every child has access to the internet at home. Anticipating the extended school closure, Pritzker’s office released a map showing public wi-fi “hotspots ” for schoolchildren who don’t have home internet access.
Republican state Rep. Ryan Spain, whose Peoria-area district reaches counties that educate more than 25,000 pupils, noted the equity issues with e-learning and said Pritzker must make clear that the semester will continue online.
“I worry about the lost development for this generation of students,” said Spain, who has a daughter in first grade. “Remote learning is a far cry from in-person school, but we need to keep students engaged to retain as much knowledge as possible.”
The other major problem is that many parents will have difficulty finding childcare if the economy reopens and they return to work while their kids still aren’t in school.
The order came a day after President Donald Trump issued guidance for states to reopen the country’s economy, which has been rocked by widespread shutdowns of nonessential businesses and 22 million people filing for unemployment. Pritzker has said he’s waiting for the number of new COVID-19 cases in Illinois to start dropping before he’ll loosen the state’s social-distancing restrictions.
He has suggested that an environment similar to the one prior to the outbreak would be possible only with rigorous testing to determine who has the virus and with whom they interacted.