Reopen public schools? How Chicago became ground zero for debate.

What’s the right thing to do when it comes to reopening public schools? As a Chicago fight shows, that answer is complicated by the health risks for the community the school is in.

Chicago has become the epicenter of a widespread debate over whether to reopen public schools.

On Sunday evening, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a Democrat, ordered teachers to return to the classroom on Monday and invited kindergarten through eighth grade students wanting to return to report to school the following day. “Our schools are safe,” she said at a news conference. “We know that because we have studied what’s happened in other school systems in our city,” referring to Roman Catholic, charter, and other schools that have opened since the pandemic. Some 5,000 prekindergarten as well as special education students have been attending public school since Jan. 11.

The Chicago Teachers Union has told its members to continue teaching remotely and said it would strike if teachers are punished for not returning.

For parents, the escalating brinkmanship between the city and the union has grown wearying. “I feel like a pawn in a chess game,” says Miles Galfer, a father of a second grader and kindergartner in the Chicago schools, whose wife is a school administrator. “Don’t tell me we’re opening until we’re opening.”

It’s been tough, he says by phone, because virtually all his neighbors’ children in his upscale, majority-white neighborhood have been attending private school in person. One private school has even begun using the playground at his children’s public school. “We’re getting tired of the union calling all the shots,” he adds.