At least 60 schools in Detroit are closed this morning after a planned teacher sick-out, continuing a protest launched last week over general turmoil in the district.
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Earley added that “obtaining that support becomes more challenging with each closure of a school due to a teacher sick-out”.
“It’s clear that teachers are feeling an overwhelming sense of frustration over the challenges that they and all DPS employees face as they do their jobs each day”, DPS Emergency Manager Darnell Earley said in a statement.
Monday’s school closures come as severely cold weather has shut down many schools across the region.
According to the district, it doesn’t know what schools are being targeted for sick-outs, but they believe there is a “strong possibility” of multiple closures on Monday. “We will continue to elevate that discussion because it too is critical to a long-term successful outcome for Detroit Public Schools and its students”.
The sickouts have been encouraged by a teacher group called Detroit Strikes to Win, headed by Steve Conn, who was ousted previous year as the head of the Detroit Federation of Teachers.
The protest is organized not by the city’s teachers’ union but by a group of activists calling themselves Detroit Teachers Fight Back. “We have classes where there is no coverage for the students, there are no teachers there because we have a teacher shortage”.
Teachers have pressured Governor Snyder and the MI legislature to approve legislation to pay off that debt. Local advocates argue that since state-appointed emergency managers haven’t been able to turn Detroit’s schools around, the state needs to contribute more funds. Throughout the past few weeks, several of the city’s schools have been forced to close due to high teacher absences.
The teachers union has not endorsed sickouts, but held a press conference today to demand what they call long-overdue change in the district’s buildings, where basic functions like heating and cooling are often broken, and classes can reach 45 students, surpassing the legal limit. Because where I want the children to be in the classroom learning.
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“We refuse to stand by while teachers, school support staff and students are exposed to conditions that one might expect in a Third World country, not the United States of America”, she said in a statement. “Yet what are we saying to our families about the city’s commitment to our kids and their education when deplorable conditions are willfully ignored?”
