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De Blasio Lays Out Phased Strategy To Reopen Schools, Prioritizing Students With Disabilities
By
Sydney Pereira
Published Nov 23, 2020
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By
Sydney Pereira
Published Nov 23, 2020
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As NYC appears all-but-certain to be placed under new state coronavirus restrictions, Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday laid out a phased approach to reopen schools after they closed last week.
Under his strategy, students with disabilities—who attend the city's District 75 schools—would head back to school first under the staggered strategy.
Then, early childhood education programs under 3-K and Pre-K programs, followed by elementary school students.
Middle and high-school students would seemingly come after that, de Blasio indicated.
"We'll keep building from there," the mayor told reporters on Monday.
The strategy lacked many details—something the mayor himself acknowledged as the city nears a testing positivity rate that would send it into an "orange zone" under Governor Andrew Cuomo's micro-cluster approach. Parts of upper Manhattan and Staten Island are already facing new restrictions after Cuomo designated new orange and yellow zones for those areas of NYC on Monday.
Widening orange zone restrictions mean "a new reality is coming into play," the mayor said.
NYC maintains local control of public schools as long as the citywide positive testing rate stays below a 7-day rolling average of 3% as determined by state data. After ten straight days at or above 3%, NYC would enter an "orange zone," Cuomo re-iterated on Monday.
After that, de Blasio would have to coordinate with Cuomo on reopening schools while zoned restrictions are in place, under guidelines set by the state.
"There is a likelihood as soon as next week even that New York City will be declared an orange zone," de Blasio said. "There's a clear protocol for that. It involves a lot more testing. It's a very conservative, cautious approach."
While in an orange zone, individual schools would require a massive amount of testing to "test out" of the closures and resume in-person instruction. Under Cuomo's guidelines, all students and faculty must be tested before returning to the school building. Schools have to remain closed for at least four calendar days after the zone designation is set under Cuomo's guidelines. After reopening, 25% of students and staff would have to be tested weekly.
The mayor urged parents to sign consent forms to have their children tested to accomplish the undertaking—a challenge, considering just 117,000 of 280,000 students currently enrolled for in-person learning have turned in the permission slips.
The Department of Education did not immediately comment on how increasing testing requirements would be accomplished.
"It'll take a whole lot of work," de Blasio said. "So our goal here is to put that together, no matter how much work it takes, no matter how much testing it takes, we're going to need a lot of parent participation."
The phased-in approach is similar to what Councilmember Mark Treyger, the City Council's education committee chair, had previously proposed back in July. It also mirrors Public Advocate Jumaane Williams's reopening plan to prioritize students with different learning needs.
Under his proposal last summer, Treyger noted, "If we do not invest aggressively in safety and equity at the front-end, we will assuredly end up paying for it on the back-end."
In a phone interview with Gothamist/WNYC on Monday, Treyger said the hybrid model de Blasio had previously attempted only led to issues with teacher staffing and older students burdened with helping younger siblings with remote learning.
"I shared a lot of these ideas with the administration back in July," Treyger said. "Unfortunately, they wanted to proceed with this hybrid model because the mayor wanted to go on national TV to say that, 'Look, I reopened the biggest school system in the country and every kid gets to go into the building.'"
"But in many cases, we knew that many kids were not waking into in-person education and this hybrid model was also built on broken trust," he added, referencing how toilet paper attached to the end of a yardstick was used to measure airflow (The Department of Education noted the method was a "tissue test" using CDC recommendations to measure airflow.)
With the phased-in approach the mayor is now endorsing, "you start small and you work out [and] you make adjustments making sure that everything is working smoothly."
"We cannot go all back to normal at once. We're in a pandemic," Treyger added.
De Blasio spokesperson Avery Cohen said in a statement, "Health and safety come first, priorities we know our elected officials and families share, and our plans for the fall we shaped with input from our public health experts, families, and staff. We'll continue working towards our shared goal of safely reopening our schools."
Tagged
COVID-19
Governor Andrew Cuomo
coronavirus
schools reopening
coronavirus reopening
mayor bill de blasio
Sydney Pereira
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