We are about to find out who runs Pittsburgh Public Schools. Is it the public or is it the teachers’ union?
It’s a most apropos question considering teachers are more than intimating that they will not return to the classroom until they are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus.
But given the slogging pace of vaccinations these days, it very well could be a ploy to see what comes first – a 100 percent inoculation rate for teachers and staff or the end of the school year.
It has been nearly a year since Pittsburgh Public Schools students have had in-class instruction. “Remote learning” has been the order of the students’ days.
But as various news reports and anecdotal stories from those in the know have it, remote instruction has been problematic. And that’s being generous.
Tales abound of lack of rigor, students missing in action and, not unexpectedly, a rising failure rate.
And all in a climate in which experts generally agree that in-person learning has not posed the dire threat of coronavirus spread that the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers (PFT) likes to portray.
Or as district solicitor Ira Weiss posited not long ago: What’s the greater exposure/infection threat, being in the classroom or teacher/staff behavior outside the classroom?
Never mind, of course, that as the Post-Gazette reports it, “(M)ost other school districts in Allegheny County have had at least some in-person instruction for their students this school year.”
And, we would add, apparently without any super-spreading events.
Nonetheless, the PFT’s executive board unanimously adopted a resolution that urged the school board and superintendent to delay a return to the classroom until full vaccination is achieved.
PFT President Nina Esposito-Visgitis told the P-G that district employees will not be able to get the vaccine until at least February. That means classroom instruction could be pushed back, again, this time to April.
The board is scheduled to consider such a delay today.
A board decision to not grant another delay means PPS employees will be subject to “potential leaves of absence and possible staff shortages, a weakened ability to deliver educational programs and a proven risk of increased illness, hospitalization or death,” Esposito-Visgitis says.
Call us cynics (“Hey, you’re cynics!”) but it almost sounds like a “job-action threat,” doesn’t it?
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
