A Cook County judge has refused a Cicero school district's request to order Circero elementary school teachers back into the classroom.
On Jan. 27, Cook County Circuit Judge Raymond Mitchell turned aside an attempt by Cicero School District 99 to secure an injunction to compel unionized teachers to return for in-person classroom instruction, as the school district desired.
“To be sure, as a matter of commonsense, I can accept the premise that in-person teaching (is) preferable to remote learning, just as I can accept the notion that in-person court proceedings are preferable to remote proceedings,” Judge Mitchell wrote in his order.
Cook County Circuit Judge Raymond Mithcell
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“But I also recognize that there are countervailing public health considerations that prompted us to resort to remote proceedings in the first instance.
“We are all anxious to return to ‘normal,’ but maintaining the status quo relative to remote learning while teachers are vaccinated hardly seems an exigent circumstance requiring injunctive relief,” the judge said.
The order came about 12 days since the Cicero elementary school district filed suit in Cook County Circuit Court, seeking an order forcing teachers to return to the classroom for in-person instruction.
The district’s attempts to reopen schools have been resisted in Cicero, as they have in Chicago and many other cities and school districts throughout the country, by teachers unions who have said they do not believe it is safe at this stage of the COVID-19 pandemic to return to more traditional classroom-based learning.
Instead, the teachers unions have demanded school districts allow remote learning to continue, as they seek massive new investments in physical improvements to the schools themselves, and to school procedures. Teachers unions have also demanded teachers receive vaccinations before they will reopen the schools.
In the district’s lawsuit, filed Jan. 15, District 99 asserts its students are suffering and falling behind under the current remote learning regimes that have dominated public education for the past 10 months, since schools were ordered closed in March 2020. This, the district said, is particularly true for special education students and pre-K students, who “struggle to learn remotely at all.”
Further, District 99 noted it has implemented “extensive safety measures” at its schools, including upgraded HVAC systems, costing $64,000, at all of its schools “for the purpose of protecting its students and faculty from airborne infection while on site,” the complaint said.
The district said it had also negotiated with the union to secure teachers’ assent to return to their classrooms.
However, the district said, a large group of teachers “are simply refusing to come to work in an unlawful walk-off that puts the health and safety of the District’s students, some as young as 3 years old, at risk.”
The district noted the courts are normally barred from intervening in bargaining matters between schools and teachers unions. Such disputes typically must go through the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board.
However, in this case, the Cicero school district said the teachers’ actions should trigger an exception under the law for illegal strikes that pose a “clear and present danger to the health and safety of the public.”
In response, the Cicero Council of the West Suburban Teachers Union, Local 571, IFT-AFT, AFL-CIO, argued it was the school district that was overstepping its authority, ordering teachers to report for work amid an ongoing infectious disease pandemic.
“The teachers and other employees in the District believe that their risk of infection from COVID-19 is higher if they are required to report to school to teach than if they continue to teach remotely,” the union wrote in its response brief.
“This risk is even higher if thousands of students are in classes in the schools. Given the course of the pandemic over the last year, where public officials have consistently underestimated the dangers of the disease, it would be difficult to imagine how anyone could argue that such a belief is not reasonable.
“Yet the District has unilaterally determined that its schools are ‘safe enough’ and ordered teachers and other employees to return to the school buildings to perform their duties.”
The union argued it had not called a strike, and its teachers continue to work, with “hundreds” in their classrooms, since Jan. 11, and “hundreds” of others “continuing to teach remotely exactly as they have done since March 2020.”
“Not a single employee is withholding their services from the District,” the union wrote.
The judge sided with the union, finding the refusal of 500 of the district’s 1,100 teachers to report to their classrooms, as instructed by the district, did not constitute a strike.
So, the judge said, with no work stoppage, the disagreement between the district and its teachers union belongs before the IELRB, not the courts.
The judge noted the Cicero district has filed an unfair labor practice charge with the state board.
District 99 is represented by attorneys Cynthia S. Grandfeld and Michael A. Albert, of the Del Galdo Law Group, of Berwyn.
The union is represented by attorney Stephen A. Yokich, of the firm of Dowd Bloch Bennett Cervone Auerbach & Yokich, of Chicago.