NYC Delays Hybrid School Reopening To September 21

New York City’s schools have 1.1 million students and over 100,000 employees—that’s over a third more people than the population of our entire state. To keep all those students and staff safer from coronavirus, New York City committed back in July to a sensible hybrid learning plan, with kids coming to school only one or two days a week, in smaller cohorts to improve social distancing, and learning the rest of the time online. NYC is also offering parents the option to keep their kids home for full-time online learning.

While South Dakota schools plunged into contagion in mid-August, New York City wasn’t planning to start school until September 10. But yesterday, New York’s mayor and educational leaders agreed they need more time to make their cautious back-to-school plan safe for all comers:

New York City was hit so hard by the pandemic in early days, and in particular… dozens of educators’ lives were lost. And so now, even though over the past few months, infection rates are very low and most public health experts say the city should be safe to reopen its schools with the proper precautions in place, you know, not everyone feels safe. When you have 1.1 million extremely diverse students, more than a hundred thousand employees – there’s a vast range of school buildings. Some of them are quite old. And so the question of what is proper precautions had become really fraught. And so I’ve been tracking, you know, street protests by teachers outside the chancellor’s house, you know, meetings that dragged on into the wee hours over Zoom and people calling for a delay, which now has been announced.

…New York City’s Department of Ed is pushing back the start of school from September 10 to September 21. And in that time period, there will be union representatives visiting every school to do their own safety checks of issues like airflow. And they’re introducing a somewhat innovative coronavirus testing program. It’s what’s called surveillance testing. So they’re planning to be taking a random sample of between 10- and 20% of the students and adults in each school each month [Anya Kamenetz, “New York City Reaches Agreement with Educator Union to Push Back the Start of School,” NPR: All Things Considered, 2020.09.01].

Funny that New York City’s leaders do not feel, as South Dakota’s Governor does, that increased coronavirus cases and deaths are inevitable. New York City leaders think that changing conditions and harsh realities warrant changing plans and trying to avoid bad outcomes. NYC’s mayor has his harmful stubborn streak, just like our Governor, but at least he can be persuaded by facts, science… and strong labor unions.