CPAA Files Lawsuit to Protect Your Health
Even after the COVID-19 related deaths of two CPS employees, CPS continues to fail to provide the essential protections needed to keep people safe at school buildings. In response, CPAA filed a lawsuit on April 27 with the Illinois Circuit Court of Cook County. Our Administrator Safety Lawsuit makes it clear CPS has failed to take the steps required by Governor Pritzker's Executive Orders to limit the spread of COVID-19.
Safety Measures Still Inadequate
Before our lawsuit, CPS failed to circulate any guidance indicating a plan for providing masks to its employees. Just one week after we filed the lawsuit, CPS circulated this guidance indicating essential staff are now required to wear a face mask when social distancing is not possible, including while distributing food, equipment, and supplies. While this latest guidance is a minor step in the right direction, it stops woefully short of complying with the Governor's Executive Orders. According to this notice, building managers will distribute one cloth face covering to each essential staff member, and CPS will not provide any replacement face coverings. The notice is also silent on any plan to ensure school leaders have adequate sanitizing supplies, or any intention to ensure the cloth face-covering mandate is applied to visitors to school buildings.
CPAA Advocates for Administrators
CPAA called for state intervention that ensured medically vulnerable administrators were added to CPS's list of report-to-work exemptions, and we made headlines and placed CPS administrator safety in the national labor spotlight with our short film and petition demanding sufficient protective gear. Still, school leaders continued to report a lack of adequate CPS-provided guidance, supplies, and support personnel to keep themselves and students' families safe during food and technology distribution. In light of these deficiencies, CPAA forged ahead with our litigation to seek court intervention to help better protect school leaders.
More than a century ago, Chicago's school leaders came together to form CPAA because they understood that there was no salvation beyond their own power; that no one would fight for them unless they created a member-funded organization to lead that fight. Today, CPAA is still the only organization that advocates and fights for Chicago's principals, assistant principals, and administrators, and our collective membership makes that fight possible.
