Chicago City Wire

Chicago’s Morning Answer journalist Amy Jacobson finds it hard to hide her rage when it comes to the Chicago Public Schools system latest COVID-19 mitigation tactics.  

“The STUPIDITY of ChiPubSchools,” Jacobson recently captioned a video she posted to Twitter that shows supporters watching a high school sporting event from outside a fence.

“We should be inside, spread out, watching the game,” she added. “Instead this.”

Earlier this month, the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) announced that CPS sporting events would be limited to 20% capacity for outdoor sports and 50 fans for indoor sports such as basketball.

But despite IDPH’s updated guidelines, the Chicago Sun-Times reports CPS officials have steadfastly refused to allow any spectators. Those rules come after CPS student athletes — until recently — were forced to the sidelines for a whole year, even as some school districts allowed games to resume for their student athletes.

“Why are there different rules for [CPS kids]?” Michael Pierce, whose son plays football at Phillips, asked the Sun-Times. "I’ve been watching my son play since he was 8 years old. And now you are telling me I have to miss his last five games of high school? Everything has been taken away from the Class of 2021. Their recruiting has suffered and now they can’t even have fans at the games.”

More recently, as the city adjusted mitigation strategies, the Chicago White Sox were allowed to increase the size of the crowd for their home-opener to 22% capacity or nearly 9,000 fans.  

In addition, the Center for Disease Control recently announced students may sit just three feet apart in the classroom as long as they follow masking protocols.