To Those Concerned,

As parents and community members, we demand that the Chicago Public Schools to immediately end its quarantine policy for students identified as exposed to a COVID-19-positive peer. In place of the current policy, which automatically sends “close contact” students home for 5 days of remote learning, a targeted Test-to-Stay protocol would allow such students who are not sick and who don't test positive to stay in school.

Deployed in a limited and targeted manner, a Test-to-Stay policy represents the most responsible and scientifically supported approach to safeguarding the health of our children and educators while also ensuring the integrity and stability of our public schools. The Federal Centers for Disease Control, the Illinois State Board of Education and the Illinois Department of Public Health have all specifically authorized these protocols as part of official Guidance for COVID-19 Prevention in K-12 Schools. Meanwhile, our peers in New York, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Atlanta, and countless other large urban school districts have long ago abandoned the use of rolling quarantines for healthy kids.

Since the full return to in-person learning in September of 2021, Chicago Public Schools has kept between 1,000 and 23,000 students out of school every day-- a scenario that predates the five-day systemwide cancellation of classes in early January and persists today. Weighed against the obvious benefits of active, thriving school communities, CPS’s current quarantine policy is ill-fitted to the realities of the pandemic, imposing a rolling schedule of child-care emergencies on parents and needlessly interrupting the intellectual and social development of our children. With minimal instances of transmission within Chicago schools since September, the public health benefits of intermittent mass quarantines are dubious. Meanwhile, the lost wages, lost learning, and replacement of social life with screen-time are measurably bad news for kids and families.

In early November, CPS CEO Pedro Martinez and City Public Health Commissioner Allison Arwady announced that a pilot for a Test-to-Stay protocol would be implemented at a handful of elementary schools. Since then, only one school has been designated (but not named) as involved in the pilot, and Local School Councils have not been informed as to how their schools might participate if interested. In the agreement that ended the five-day showdown between the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union earlier this month, both parties affirmed the need to promote alternatives to quarantines.

Given the diverse rates and levels of vaccination present among Chicago schoolchildren, an end to quarantine policy is the best way to ensure that all of our children are treated equally, and to preempt any stigmatized “tiering” of access to public education. It is long past time to ditch the broad brush of cohort quarantine, which is already drawing of sharp public lines of exclusion, already reinforcing the city’s patterns of social inequality, and likely to exacerbate political polarization.

We urge the Chicago Department of Public Health, the Chicago Board of Education, and the Chicago Public Schools announce an end to their quarantine policy, and move toward the immediate adoption of a targeted Test-to-Stay policy, and to share a public timeline for implementation, inclusive of logistics, staffing, and funding.

Sincerely,