CHICAGO — Most kids were wearing face coverings as they entered Park Manor Elementary School on Monday, even as Chicago Public Schools relaxed its mask rules for students and staff.
The school — in the Greater Grand Crossing community on the South Side — has struggled with COVID-19, especially heading into the winter break in December. Twenty-four people were in quarantine or isolation Sunday, after a positive case was detected at the school last week, according to CPS data.
“I’m not comfortable with the masks getting taken off. It’s too soon. It’s really too soon,” parent Rosheena Green said Monday as she dropped her 12-year-old daughter off at Park Manor, a school with about 250 students.
“People are still getting sick, and the summer is coming. The weather is changing, so there’s still a chance that these kids could get sick.”
CPS cited a decline in cases as one reason why it made masks optional for students and staff members this week even as it faces opposition from the Chicago Teachers Union. The district and the union reached a COVID-19 safety agreement, which includes a masking provision, in January after days of canceled classes amid the omicron surge. The district is still recommending masks.
The union safety deal is set to expire in August. The two sides are slated to present their cases to the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board on Wednesday.
In the meantime, some parents celebrated the end of the mask mandate Monday. Lacey Cox, a parent of four Park Manor students, said it’s up to her kids to decide if they want to wear a face covering. They are carrying one just in case it would appease some teachers, she said.
“Personally, I don’t do masks. You know, I have breathing issues and the constriction ... it’s hard for me to deal with it. And I understand (it) being hard for them to deal with it too,” Cox said about her children.
CPS announced Friday that masks still must be worn in certain situations, such as when visiting the school nurse; when exhibiting COVID-19 symptoms; and when returning from five days of learning or working from home after contracting COVID-19 or being exposed to it.
CPS, the largest school district in Illinois, was one of the last locally to transition to a mask-optional policy even when facing litigation from downstate attorney Tom DeVore, who challenged Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s COVID-19 school policies.
John Rodriguez dropped his 4-year-old daughter off Monday morning at Blair Early Childhood Center on the Southwest Side. He said later she was excited not to wear a mask to school, and he’s not concerned about the policy change, even though she’s not old enough to get a vaccine against COVID-19. The Rodriguez family successfully battled the virus in December, he said.
“The first couple months of school, every couple of weeks, she had a new cold. So I was kind of like, well, is this mask protecting us from COVID?” said Rodriguez, who lives in the Garfield Ridge neighborhood. “And then at some point, around Christmas time, someone brought COVID into the house. It could have been her at school. It could have been me at work or my wife at work. We’re not really sure, but we all wore masks, and we still got it.”
Jessica Muñoz, who has a 5-year-old at Blair and an older child, said she was somewhat apprehensive about the end of universal masking in CPS.
“I mean, I want to see. Like, I believe if you’re vaccinated, it works,” she said, but added that in CPS, “not a lot of kids I know are vaccinated. So it’s like, I don’t know how it works.”
Sophia Ramos, mother of a 4-year-old at Blair, said she was “really happy that they’ve gone mask optional. I was really frustrated with the teachers union and not having a voice in whether or not to mask my child.”
Blair serves 218 students between preschool and first grade, according to CPS. The school reported a few COVID-19 cases in early February, but none since then, CPS data shows.
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