[Scroll down for update] The New York City public school system’s reopening will be delayed, with “instructional transition and orientation” starting remotely on September 16th and in-person learning pushed back to September 21st, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Tuesday.
The change from a planned September 10th in-person school reopening comes after weeks of mounting pressure from educators who insisted they need more time to prepare, and the escalating possibility of a strike mounted by the United Federation of Teachers, the powerful union representing tens of thousands of NYC public school teachers.
The delay in reopening buildings will allow for more instructional preparation and to allow more testing for the students, teachers and staff who will be inside school buildings, de Blasio said at his press briefing Tuesday.
“On September 21st, Monday, the school buildings open full strength,” de Blasio said in his Tuesday press briefing.
As the biggest school district in the country, New York’s bold attempt to reopen schools for in-person learning was under intense scrutiny from the day that de Blasio announced blended learning would commence this fall. The UFT union president Michael Mulgrew, pressing for more safety equipment, upgraded ventilation and mandatory testing for everyone in blended learning, said a strike is a possibility if the city did not agree to their requests.
Appearing at de Blasio’s press briefing, Mulgrew gave his approval of de Blasio’s announcement, which includes a mandatory monthly COVID-19 testing program, conducted randomly at every school.
“Our independent medical experts have stamped this plan, and we now can say the New York City public school system has the most aggressive policies and greatest safeguards of any school system in the United States of America,” Mulgrew said.
“I want to emphasize that we have a huge obligation to get the health and safety part right, which is why we have literally set the global gold gold standard,” de Blasio said. “We have said New York City is taking the best practices, the strongest methods from all around the world, and applying them all together here in our public schools -- the highest standard anywhere in the world to protect our kids, our families, our educators, our staff.”
De Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza had been moving ahead with the start of the public school year on September 10th with a combination of in-person and remote learning: Students can attend classes at school a few days a week with the remainder online, or attend 100% remote learning. However, the UFT has remained skeptical of promised safety measures, laying out the possibility of a teachers' strike on the table.
This comes after the UFT said on Monday that if negotiations with City Hall fell through, they would vote on Tuesday afternoon on whether to authorize a strike.
Teachers have also expressed concerned with the design of some schools that are located in basements and/or don't have windows. The Department of Education operates 1,600 public schools over 1,300 buildings (space is also shared with 260 charter schools.
De Blasio and Carranza have maintained that they are making sure schools are safe, dispatching School Ventilation Action Teams to review buildings. The city is also allowing schools to use playgrounds, streets, and parks for outdoor learning; as of Monday, 247 schools' outdoor learning proposals had been approved.
Of the approximately 1 million students enrolled in NYC public schools, 366,553 students will be learning remotely, based on data from August 28th (on August 14th, 304,880 students were signed up for remote learning). Students enrolled in hybrid learning may opt into remote learning at any time, while students in remote learning can return to their school every quarter.
City teachers haven't gone on strike since 1975. It is technically against the law for New York's public employees to strike, and members could face repercussions if they do. In 2005, the Transit Workers' Union, representing NYC Transit employees, went on strike for three days over wages, and their president, Roger Toussaint, was sentenced to 10 days in jail.
UPDATE 12:25 p.m.: The random testing in schools will involve both students and staff, with 10-20 percent of each school community chosen for testing each month, according to DOE officials and the UFT.
The full details on how the random testing would be carried out — and its efficacy — will be developed over the next few days, de Blasio said.
Dr. Jay Varma, the mayor’s Senior Advisor for Public Health, said the random testing was intended to identify asymptomatic cases in schools.
“The medical monitoring program that you're hearing about today is really focused on the people who are physically present in the school, and so therefore not people with symptoms,” he said at the press briefing. “The purpose of this is to really give us really good insight into...how many people may be infected at any one time who don't have symptoms, because we know that's one of the challenges of this disease. And so we are going to be working very closely with students, with parents, with all the teachers and the staff to develop a robust approach to developing a random sample of each school, and they will then have specimens collected in the school, and then testing performed to give us results immediately.”
Carranza said one of the reasons for the reopening delay was to aid teachers in professional development, and to ease students back into school buildings. “Teachers who usually get two days of professional development at the beginning of the school year -- and we all know this is going to be a school year, unlike any school year we've ever started -- will now get nine,” he said. “Students who haven't been inside a school building in half a calendar year -- think about that -- will have a chance to reconnect with their school, meet their teachers and classmates and make sure that they have the tools that they need to be successful for this school year.”
In addition, the union requested that more personal protective equipment be available for schools. The DOE will give schools a 30-day supply of PPE that will constantly be replenished, Carranza said. “Every day there will be 30 days of supply there, and we will replenish it every day so there's constantly a 30 day supply,” he said. He added that some schools may use their own resources to buy additional equipment such as personalized masks with school logos, but the DOE is supplying the PPE that schools need.