CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- A few thousand Chicago Public high school teachers are working from home or outside their school buildings instead of inside them Wednesday because their union is not close enough to a deal yet to resume in-person learning.
The Chicago Teachers Union had said a couple of days ago that if there were "adequate" progress in negotiations with the Chicago Public Schools system, there would not be a work action Wednesday by high school teachers.
CTU President Jesse Sharkey said there has been progress, just not “adequate” progress.
"If we got a proposal from them, I guess the decision we would have had to make last night was do we call people in for a midnight meeting and then try to change our instructions to 6,000 members. That would have been a hard decision, but it was made easier by the fact that we didn’t get a response," he said.
Still being negotiated are high school schedules, giving teachers with health and child care issues the option of working remotely, and working on some kind of vaccination program for students and their families.
The 4,300 or so high school teachers had shown up to school buildings Monday and Tuesday.
CTU Vice President Stacy Davis Gates said, "It is up to us to put guardrails around our reopening in Chicago to demonstrate that safety is possible."
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