The Elephant in the Room Part 2: What about Clinicians and lack of workspace?
Since I wrote the last article, there have been a number of communications by CPS, CTU and Clinician delegates. There has not been a change about when the prekindergarten and cluster programs start which is January 4, 2021. One thing is clear: there has been no change in how the lack space for clinicians to do their work. Clinicians are the last ones considered by schools for space and other resources. Often they would see children in very inappropriate setting before COVID and there appears no discussion to give them the space they need with the extra consideration for social distancing. There has been no information on how clinicians are to go to multiple settings and handle seeing children in person and working with those students using remote platforms.
There was a Clinician Professional Problems Committee meeting on Wednesday, December 9th with the new Clinical Director that replaced Anthony Adamowski. There have not been any information on what was discussed. There is a CTU Clinicians Facebook page which has 758 members which is half the number of clinicians working for CPS. I would urge CPS clinicians to join this group as hopefully you will be able to ask questions and get answers. Recently speech pathologists had a meeting where they were told they are going to be redeployed. This means they do not know what their caseload will be and how many students they will service. They are the only clinician group that has an Illinois law that dictates they are only to have 60 students on their caseload. A few years ago, CTU won an arbitration because CPS was routinely giving them more and they were compensated. There has been some clinicians just like the clerks and tech personnel that have been ordered to go to schools to do assessments.
There has been a set of guidelines on how the rollout of school opening on January 4th. It raises a host of questions which will hopefully be answered this coming week.
Here is the document:
https://www.cps.edu/school-reopening-2020/reopening-letter/
CPS came out with their so-called myth buster document which is a way to show how wrong teachers, school staff, clinicians, students and parents about the safety issues dealing with COVID.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MavqJuyGK9nMXNhzRJ5fTtnQU7EDRZD5HwSbb7Fetxk/preview
As we prepare to welcome families and teachers back to school in the new year, we have been talking to families to learn more about how we can better support them as they return to school, and answer their questions or concerns. While many questions were personal to each family’s unique needs, we also heard time and again several unfounded myths. So below, here’s the recurring myths that we’ve heard and what the facts really are. Some of these questions or statements have come from community meeting notes, while others are sourced from the news. When possible, we have provided the link to the source.
