Hot on the heels of today’s ruling by the 4th District Appellate Court effectively vacating Governor Pritzker’s school masking mandate and throwing the issue back to local school boards, the Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT) wasted no time in making clear what it expects of Illinois’ public schools.
IFT President Dan Montgomery issued the following statement after the ruling was announced:
“The Illinois 4th District Appellate Court’s decision released late last night makes one thing clear: school districts are free to implement their own safety measures around COVID-19. And they should. Since the beginning of this pandemic, we have insisted that proper mitigations are in place to protect students, teachers and staff, and their families. This was to reduce sickness and death and to keep schools open for in-person learning as much as possible. Today’s appellate court ruling does nothing to change that calculus.
“We continue to insist that school districts statewide abide by existing collective bargaining agreements that are in place to promote health and safety in schools and to follow our laws around safe schools and workplaces. As cases continue to decline, discussions about removing these mitigations must be based on good public health decisions. Medical science tells us that vaccinations, masking, and proper ventilation have been the best ways to maintain health in schools. Schools have been able to remain open because of the implementation and enforcement of these mitigation strategies designed to protect everyone in school communities, including their families.”
Teachers unions around the country have long contended that masking, among other mitigation measures such as vaccinations, ventilation and social distancing, is crucial for student and staff safety. The IFT’s assertion that medical science requires student masking presumably relies on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) current guidelines that require masking in schools, guidance that was immediately taken up by the Illinois Department of Public Health.
That guidance, however, has been subject to withering criticism across the spectrum as lacking any evidential scientific basis, particularly with the onset of the now-dominant Omicron variant of COVID-19.
According to critics of the CDC policy, available evidence from across the world suggests that primary grade students have the lowest risk of serious illness of any age group, even lower than fully-vaccinated senior citizens. Most of Europe and the UK have rejected masking for primary grade students throughout the pandemic, with no significant ill effects to students in evidence. The CDC’s European counterpart, the European Center for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as The World Heath Organization, recommend against student masking due to the evidence of serious side effects including developmental issues, psychological distress, and increases in suicide or suicidal ideation, among others.
And the CDC’s methodology has been called into question from even normally sympathetic sources.
“Dubious research has been cited after the fact, without transparency, in support of existing agency guidance,” wrote David Zweig in the center-left publication The Atlantic. ‘Research requires trust and the ability to verify work,’ Ketcham, the ASU public-health economist, told me. ‘That’s the heart of science. The saddest part of this is the erosion of trust.'”
That erosion of trust in the objectivity of CDC guidance as it relates to schools was further eroded last fall when it was discovered that the national American Federation of Teachers had directly influenced CDC policy.
What this suggests for Illinois school districts generally, and Fox Valley school districts specifically, is that, at least for now, the considerable power of teachers unions will play a significant part in what happens next. A fact that the IFT president made crystal clear.
