Seeking clarity after a tumultuous week, the Oak Park and River Forest School District 200 board last week held a special board meeting to try to better understand why the district suspended all extracurricular activities and then three days later reversed course.
The fast-moving series of events began on Friday, Dec. 3 when district officials announced that all extracurricular activities, including all sports, would be suspended due to a rise in the incidence of COVID-19 cases. That prompted a controversial rally the following day outside Oak Park and River Forest High School, followed by district administrators’ decision on Monday, Dec. 6 to do an about-face and announce that all extracurricular activities were back on.
At the Dec. 7 special meeting, board members largely sought to understand what triggered each decision, with some board members demanding better communications with the entire board regarding such decisions.
Theresa Chapple-McGruder, who is the Village of Oak Park’s public health director, told board members that what had alarmed her was a spike in COVID-19 cases.
“The uptick in cases started the week of Thanksgiving and then went into the following week. What happened at the high school was that almost half of the cases that you all had throughout the entire first 17 weeks of school, you had in two weeks,” she told the board. “We also looked at the community transmission rate in your school and compared it to the community transmission rate in Oak Park in general, and the…cases at your school put the transmission rate at OPRF at four times the rate of the community. Knowing another data point was that only a few hundred students were getting tested….so we knew that for sure the amount of the virus that was in the schools was probably not accounted for already in those cases. Those were the reasons why we needed to put some mitigations in place.”
Chapple-McGruder added that of particular concern for her was that the spike in cases had come among students who had been vaccinated. She told the board that “there would have been a different approach” if the outbreak had been among only unvaccinated students.
“I really can’t say that there’s going to be one particular number that I want you all to look out for, and this (number) is when I’m going to get concerned and start having these conversations about what are we going to do,” she told the board. “It’s really the context of it and the impact of it and these are the conversations that I have. My job is not just to look at outbreaks in schools, but to look at outbreaks… in day care (centers) and long-term care facilities, and anywhere they happen in our community, and I’m having these constant conversations around what things look like.”
The district’s decision provoked an outcry that led to a raucous Dec. 4 rally at the school. Board President Sara Dixon Spivy was at the rally, as were Chapple-McGruder and district Supt. Greg Johnson. Spivy told her colleagues at last week’s meeting that she was appalled at the behavior at the rally by members of the public, which included students and parents angry about the prospects of extracurricular activities not taking place.
“I too was at the rally on Saturday. I was — shocked probably isn’t the right word — I was really aghast at how that crowd responded to what they were being told by Dr. Chapple-McGruder and also by Greg,” Spivy said. “They’d ask a question and then shout down the answer so that the person…couldn’t even respond to the question asked. I’d never seen anything like it. To say it was disappointing or disheartening does not do it justice. I just think it’s incredibly unfair.”
Spivy’s comments followed previous reports of Chapple-McGruder suffering harassment from community members.
“Dr. Chapple-McGruder, it’s a sacrificial position you take in the public body…and just to be subjected to that kind of behavior, and it to go on for months without a real condemnation (of harassment) from people in this community is embarrassing, simply embarrassing,” board member Kebreab Henry said. “It is a little late…and we could have done a statement earlier, but it didn’t come. Dr. Chapple-McGruder and her family are being harassed, targeted and have felt unsafe in their home. If this is who we are as a community, then we’ve got to look at ourselves. If we condone this behavior, we’ve got to think about why we’ve allowed it to happen, why is it acceptable.
“Why are we not outraged? We are outraged by sports being cancelled but not outraged by a public official being harassed and targeted, and a Black woman at that who has gone through a tremendous amount of judgment and pain and antagonistic behavior. I’m just disappointed in the behavior and disappointed in our response.”
The day after the rally, the district’s administrative leaders reversed course, allowing athletics and club activities to continue but implementing a variety of new mitigation measures, including requiring N95 masks, asking students to spread out more during lunch and requesting that as many students as possible submit to saliva testing.
At last week’s meeting, district Supt. Greg Johnson told board members that the current level of mitigations is not sustainable.
“I want to be clear to the community and to our students and to the people in the room: What we are doing right now for our mitigation strategies is not sustainable. I just want to be really clear about that. It is not sustainable permanently the way we’re doing it right now,” he said. “We cannot sacrifice a curricular area permanently in order to do this work. It’s just the reality of it. It’s important for our reality to be transparent but also to point out that while we were able to put something in place right now, given what we really saw spike, last week, it is nothing that we would have pulled the trigger on in a regular time. I just want to be really transparent about what that reality was and what that means for us. We’re doing our best in a very challenging situation.”
Board member Gina Harris criticized Spivy and the district’s administrative leadership, asserting that she and other board members hadn’t been made aware of all the information during what was a fast-moving situation.
“It sounds as though and this is more directed for…leadership on the board, conversations were being had but those conversations were not being had with the entire board,” Harris said. “And that is concerning to me. And the conversations may have been comments but not in the way that some people have information and others don’t. And I know that we move collectively as a board, so I just want to express that concern.”
Board member Ralph Martire pressed Chapple-McGruder and the administration on the newly implemented mitigation measures in lieu of canceling extracurricular activities, asking if those measures were on the table before Dec. 3 and if so, why they were not in place.
“It was clear that crowding was an issue,” Chapple-McGruder said. “We had three areas of crowding, and what we needed was that we had to come down and pick at least one of those areas that we could address because on Friday we had five new cases that day. And I could not let it continue over the weekend and into the next week and keep watching the case numbers increase without us coming down firm on a mitigation approach. I feel like I was extremely clear in that conversation, that we had to pick something. Was it an official mandate? I did not do an order that is within my authority. I did not write an order saying this, but what I did do was say clearly we must pick something today, and these are our options.”
Board members left unresolved how longer-term higher-level mitigation strategies will be implemented in the weeks after the holiday break, particularly if case counts rise further due to the Omicron variant.
Jennifer Flodin, who with her husband organized the rally, told the board at the Dec. 7 meeting that she and her husband were “devastated for the kids” by the cancellation of extracurricular activities. She termed it a “knee-jerk reaction,” and pointed out that at least half of the speakers at the rally were people of color.
“It was not a white privilege, white-everywhere rant against the school board or the (village) department of health,” she said.
Another parent, Shobha Mahadev, told the board at the meeting that her family was “horrified” by the images and vitriol aimed at Chapple-McGruder and the district’s administration.
“There is simply no reason to target Dr. Chapple-McGruder for her guidance and expertise in a fast-moving public health crisis,” she said. “I think we can all agree that her aim and the OPRF administration’s aim in these decisions was to keep everyone safe and healthy in the face of concerning evidence of several outbreaks of COVID-19.”
