With the planned first day of school in New York City rapidly approaching, Mayor Bill de Blasio is facing mounting pressure from the city’s teachers, principals and even members of his own administration to delay the start of in-person instruction by several weeks to give educators more time to prepare.
Mr. de Blasio has been hoping to reopen the nation’s largest school system on a part-time basis for the city’s 1.1 million schoolchildren this fall — a feat no other big-city mayor is currently even attempting.
If New York is able to reopen schools safely, it would be an extraordinary turnaround for a city that was a global epicenter of the pandemic just a few months ago. Schools are the key to the city’s long path back to normalcy: opening classrooms would help jump start the struggling economy by allowing more parents to return to work, and would provide desperately needed services for tens of thousands of vulnerable students.
But Mr. de Blasio’s push to reopen on time is now facing its most serious obstacle yet: the city’s principals, tasked with actually implementing the reopening plan, are questioning the city’s readiness.
“We are now less than one month away from the first day of school and still without sufficient answers to many of the important safety and instructional questions we’ve raised,” Mark Cannizzaro, president of the city’s principals’ union, wrote in a letter last week, calling on the mayor to heed his members’ “dire warnings.”
New York City has a virus transmission rate so low that it is closer to that of South Korea’s than of many other American cities, and there is agreement among many public health experts that the city’s infection rate is low enough to reopen at least some schools, with strict safety measures in place.
But New York is learning that having the virus under control — something few other places in the country have managed to do — is only the first step to reopening schools.
Pulling off a hybrid learning plan, with children reporting to school a few days a week to allow for social distancing, has presented profound logistical challenges. Like many other districts, the city is discovering that months spent figuring out how to safely reopen buildings may not have left enough time to focus on instruction.
The city’s scramble to make a hybrid model work has daunting implications for other school systems, which are waiting for their virus case loads to go down before they even consider partially reopening.
Some New York City charter schools and private schools have already delayed their own plans for a part-time reopening, and have opted to start the year with only remote learning.
The city’s public school principals say they do not know how many of their students will actually report to buildings on the planned first day, Sept. 10, because there is no deadline for families to switch from hybrid learning to remote only. So far, about 30 percent of city families have said they will start the year remotely, but that number could change significantly before the start of school.
That has made it all but impossible for principals to plan their class schedules, and to determine how many teachers they will need to staff remote instruction, in-person learning, or both. Principals say they need more than the two work days in September that the city has allotted for them to meet with teachers in order to make decisions about staffing.
And though the city has begun to ship personal protective equipment and cleaning supplies to schools, and has made strides in preparing many of its aging buildings for reopening, there are lingering questions about how many classrooms will have proper ventilation, and about how frequently staff and students will be tested after buildings open.
The city’s biggest obstacle appears to be time.
Mr. de Blasio’s administration began preparing for school reopening in earnest late in the spring, according to several people with direct knowledge of the planning process, both to focus on preparing for summer school and to assess the viability of reopening at a moment when the virus was only beginning to loosen its grip on the city.
But reopening would be a daunting logistical endeavor for even a small district, and three months was not nearly enough time to pull together plans for 1,800 schools, said Mr. Cannizzaro.
Though the principals’ union is smaller and much less powerful than the city’s teachers’ union, concerns from school leaders carry particular weight since they rarely wade into political fights — and because principals have been tasked with actually making reopening work.
Over the last few days, a growing number of principals have come forward to say that there just isn’t enough time.
About fifty school leaders signed a letter that called for a delay to in-person instruction until the end of September and included a detailed plan for how to phase children into schools over the course of the fall, starting with young children.
The specificity of their request may make it harder for Mr. de Blasio to ignore. Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, has said he does not believe city schools will be ready on Sept. 10, but has not yet offered up an alternative plan.
In recent days, Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, and Mark Treyger, chair of the City Council’s education committee and a close ally of the city’s teachers’ union, have joined the chorus asking Mr. de Blasio to allow more time before the physical reopening of classrooms.
Last week, the union representing school aides, lunch cooks and other school staff, many of whom have been working in school buildings throughout the pandemic, requested a delay of 30 days before schools physically reopen.
The mayor has so far resisted a delay. The decision about whether to reopen and when is his alone; Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who has contradicted the mayor on a number of education decisions over the last several months, said schools across the state are cleared to reopen as long as they are in a region with a test positivity rate under 5 percent.
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Last week, Mr. de Blasio partially chalked up concerns as part of typical negotiations between City Hall and the city’s labor force, saying, “unions will always sound various alarms, and unions will say things sometimes in a very dramatic fashion.”
The mayor went further the following day, saying of educators’ concerns, “Sometimes people think that if you raise enough questions and doubts, folks will run away and hide. That’s not what I do. That’s not what New Yorkers do. We just don’t surrender.”
Rachael Bedard, a doctor who serves inmates on Rikers Island and who supports school reopening, wrote in a post on Twitter that the mayor’s remarks were emblematic of what she called a misguided approach to reopening.
“No one is asking for surrender,” Dr. Bedard said. “All stakeholders want to understand why the mayor thinks this is safe when so many others seem to think it isn’t. He misses every opportunity to reassure, to educate and to empathize.”
Mr. de Blasio has said he is committed to having as many students back in classrooms as safely possible, and has argued that in-person instruction is crucial for the city’s public school students, who are mostly low-income and Black and Latino. That assertion is widely supported by both public health and education experts.
The mayor’s concerns about remote learning were the major reason he resisted closing the schools in March as the virus was spreading largely undetected throughout New York, despite pleas from parents and educators. Mr. de Blasio’s hesitation widened the rift between his administration and the teachers’ union, which began calling for schools to close several days before the mayor ultimately relented.
That relationship has reached a nadir over the summer. Mr. Mulgrew has said his members no longer trust the mayor after the delayed school closure decision this spring.
Though it is illegal for teachers to strike in New York, Mr. Mulgrew has threatened to sue the city if schools reopen before his union deems it safe, and indicated to his members this week that he might support an unauthorized strike.
That would be a nightmarish scenario for Mr. de Blasio, who was once a public school parent himself and speaks frequently about his feeling of deep connection to the city’s schools and educators.
Some people in Mr. de Blasio’s administration have been privately urging him to avoid such an outcome by announcing a revised timeline on in-person instruction, but the mayor is so far determined to forge ahead with the original date, according to several people with knowledge of his thinking.
Even if the mayor ultimately decides to delay, there is no guarantee that classrooms will physically reopen later in the fall — or even for months to come.
Though the city’s test positivity rate is currently around 1 percent, Mr. de Blasio has said he will not open schools or will close them if that rate reaches 3 percent. Experts predict that the city’s rate could tick up as cold weather arrives and New Yorkers start congregating indoors.
Mr. de Blasio has said he expects school to return to normal after there is a vaccine.
Though New York received a tragic lesson in the unpredictability of the virus this spring, Mr. Cannizzaro said he believes a delayed start to in-person instruction would be the best way to ensure that children can actually return to school buildings in a sustained way.
“This ask for time is to make sure when we get kids in buildings, families like it enough that they want to stay,” he said.
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August 18, 2020 at 02:00PM
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Can N.Y.C. Schools Open on Time? De Blasio Is Under Pressure to Delay - The New York Times
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