Chicago Public Schools are ready to open, according to officials.
CHICAGO — Chicago Public Schools said classrooms are ready for students and teachers to safely return Wednesday after the district installed air purifiers and took other measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Last month, the Chicago Teachers Union said neither teachers nor students should return to class because school buildings are old and not designed to sufficiently ventilate and purify air during a pandemic.
CPS said it addressed those concerns by spending $8.5 million to put a HEPA air purifier in every classroom. District officials said the 20,000 purifiers are capable of removing “99.9% of ultrafine particles,” including airborne mold, bacteria and viruses like COVID-19.
Additionally, CPS officials said the district implemented the top five COVID-19 mitigation efforts recommended by the Centers for Disease Control to keep schools safe, and hired independent industrial hygienists to produce a school-by-school analysis of air quality and ventilation systems.
Now the district says classrooms are ready for students and staff so long as they have either a HEPA filter or an operating mechanical ventilation system which includes both an air supply and an exhaust. By those standards, CPS says 99% of its classrooms are ready and the ones that are not will be prioritized for repairs.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Wow … CLEAN AIR? Glad some people are paying attention to CLEAN AIR.
Took a pandemic.
I’m not so sure they are still this confident. Pre-K and Special Ed teachers were supposed to return Monday. That isn’t the plan anymore according to my sources (CPS Teachers/admins).
Will be interesting o see how the teacher union responds, it has been virulently opposed …
I question if there really are HEPA filters in those so called purifiers. My previous classroom had an individual heating/cooling unit and the filter got changed once a year – maybe.
Ultimately, parents and guardians will decide this in Chicago and elsewhere. 😐
Yes they checked my classroom 305 gets the go-ahead for return to school! But the bathrooms lack adequate ventilation and the testers did not even check half the rooms. Someone at the papers should be watching Board members spending habits. $8.2 million for this stuff. Oh can a HEPA R2D2 machine cover as a sub when someone’s out? Oh, ok.
Great point, MSS–how about the bathrooms? Do the toilet have lids? I would guess not, & there’s a study out on how “flushing the toilet may fling coronavirus aerosols all over”
(6/16/20 New York Times)–the flume resultant from flushing “can generate a cloud of aerosol droplets that rises nearly 3 feet…those droplets may linger in the air long enough to be inhaled by a shared toilet’s next user, or land on surfaces in the bathroom.”
This from the journal Physics of Fluids.
I wonder what their class sizes will be like. In Utah, we have upwards of 35 kids per class and the spread is about what you’d imagine. Over two dozen schools closed because of high case numbers, terrible lack of funding and PPE, horrible ventilation, the works
And now the state is “considering” having all secondary schools go fully remote from Thanksgiving to Winter Break. Doubt it will happen, but that’s where we stand. It’s BAD here.