President of Key U.S Teachers’ Union calls for reopening schools this fall

Randi Weingarten, president of the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union, plans to call on Thursday for a full reopening of the nation’s schools for the next academic year, saying: “There is no doubt: Schools must be open. In person. Five days a week.”

Her prepared remarks, made available to The New York Times, come with about half of the nation’s public schools not offering five days per week of in-person learning to all students and with many families uncertain about whether they will have the option for a more traditional schedule in the fall.

Teachers’ unions have been one key barrier to a broader opening this school year, accused of slowing reopening timelines as they sought strict virus mitigation measures, even after teachers began to be vaccinated in large numbers.

“It’s not risk-free,” Ms. Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which has 1.7 million members, plans to say, according to the remarks. She is expected to argue that the health risks can be managed through a range of practices — some of them relatively simple, such as masking and handwashing, and some of them more difficult to achieve at scale, such as decreasing class sizes to maintain distance and procuring additional spaces to meet outside cramped school buildings.

“The United States will not be fully back until we are fully back in school. And my union is all in,” Ms. Weingarten, a close ally of President Biden, plans to say, pledging to commit $5 million for a campaign in which teachers will host open houses and go door to door to build families’ confidence in returning to school.

Ms. Weingarten’s speech is sure to be greeted skeptically by some parents and school district leaders, who have been frustrated by some local unions’ insistence on two-hour school days — so students will not need to remove masks to eat lunch — or ambitious ventilation system overhauls instead of simpler solutions, such as fans and open windows.

Some local unions have argued that because so many families, particularly Black, Hispanic and Asian families, continue to opt out of in-person learning, returning to classrooms is less important than improving remote learning.

But in her speech, which will be delivered remotely via social media, Ms. Weingarten plans to acknowledge that “prolonged isolation is harmful” to students and that online instruction has negatively affected learning. She will say that reopening schools increases both teachers’ and parents’ comfort with returning, and that many parents, particularly mothers, are unable to work when school schedules are truncated. ...