Some New York City teachers question timing of reopening schools as
COVID-19 cases soar
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[December 03, 2020]
By Gabriella Borter and Nathan Layne
(Reuters) - Jamie Ewing longs for the day
when he can return to teaching his fourth-grade class face-to-face,
safely and permanently - but he is not confident that will be the case
next week when he is due to go back to his school in the South Bronx.
Ewing's school is among hundreds of pre-kindergarten and elementary
schools in New York City that Mayor Bill de Blasio said can return to
the classroom for in-person learning on Monday after an abrupt shutdown
of all city schools two weeks ago due to a rise in COVID-19 cases.
Next week's reopenings are an about-face from the initial plan to keep
schools closed if the city's positive COVID-19 test rate exceeded 3%.
With the citywide seven-day average hovering at 4.8% as of Wednesday,
Ewing and other teachers are concerned about the sudden shift by de
Blasio just as a second wave of infections threatens the country's most
populous city.
"I don’t want us to open, be back for a week and then shut it down
again. We can’t do that to our kids," Ewing, 55, said in a telephone
interview. "They get excited, they get back, they get into a routine and
then we’ll yank the rug out from under them again."
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To be sure, Ewing and some of his colleagues appreciate de Blasio's
efforts to get young students back in the classroom first and prefer not
having the 3% benchmark for school closings.
"The fact that the city is taking a more nuanced approach and moving
away from the hard-and-fast 3 percent is good because it will at least
get a few more kids back" into the classroom, said Brian Oestreich, a
social worker at a Brooklyn high school.
Even so, de Blasio's seemingly spontaneous change of plan, announced on
a Sunday just before an anticipated post-Thanksgiving acceleration in
new COVID-19 cases, may have undermined faith in the city's leadership
on education, teachers said.
After the closure two weeks ago, "the mayor didn't have clarity on how
he would reopen schools in the first place," said Annie Tan, a
31-year-old fifth-grade special education teacher in Brooklyn. "I think
that's a huge reason people are really angry about this now."
During the summer, de Blasio fought hard to reopen classrooms. In
contrast to other big-city districts that opened with online instruction
only, de Blasio and the city's teachers union eventually agreed to a
hybrid plan that blended online and in-class instruction. Under that
agreement, classrooms would close if the city hit the 3% seven-day
positive test rate.
When the rate topped that benchmark a week before last Thursday's
Thanksgiving holiday and the city closed schools, de Blasio was
criticized for disrupting the lives of students and parents while
restaurants and bars were permitted to operate.
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![](../images/120320PIX/news_J17.jpg)
Children look out the window of a school bus during the COVID-19
pandemic in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, U.S., December 2,
2020. REUTERS/Jeenah Moon
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When he announced on Nov. 19 that schools needed to close, he had
not yet established what standards would need to be met for them to
reopen.
"Sometimes it is hard to imagine the next phase until you get there.
You do your damnedest to plan ahead but you can't always do that,"
he told reporters at the time.
Representatives of the mayor's office and the Board of Education did
not immediately return a request for comment on Wednesday.
On Sunday, the mayor announced a change in tack: the city would
scrap the 3% benchmark because new research showed that young
children appear to be less vulnerable to COVID-19 than the general
population.
Schools will still be subject to closure by the state if their local
communities experience high rates of infection.
The city's new plan allows in-person learning five days a week where
possible, for the first time since the pandemic struck the city.
Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers,
said in a statement that the union supported the new plan so long as
"stringent testing was in place."
Students returning to school must have a signed consent form
agreeing to coronavirus testing or a letter of medical exemption
from a doctor. Tests will be conducted in schools on a weekly, not
monthly, basis. Only about a fifth of students will be tested in a
given week.
Meanwhile, the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations in the city has
doubled in three weeks, New York City Health Commissioner Dave
Chokshi said on Tuesday. Health experts say the surge is expected to
worsen as people who celebrated Thanksgiving outside their
households start to show symptoms - just before young students and
their teachers head back to school.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2020/Dec/03/images/ads/current/humanesociety_sda022411.png)
"I think it's really misguided to think that we can reopen a week
after Thanksgiving," said Tan, the special education teacher. "It
all really goes back to the mayor and his lack of planning."
(Reporting by Gabriella Borter and Nathan Layne; additional
reporting by Jonathan Allen; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
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