NEW YORK
Pressure to Close NYC Schools
Coronavirus in N.Y.C.: Pressure to Close School System, Nation’s Largest
Quotes from Article:
Across the country, school districts have shut down to curb the spread of coronavirus. But
in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo have resisted doing so, despite facing mounting demands.
The pressure has come from elected officials like the City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, who on Friday called on the city to temporarily close it schools. “It is not time to panic,” he
wrote on Twitter. “But it is time to act.” It has come from Michael Mulgrew, the president of the city’s teachers’ union, who on Friday afternoon called on Mr. de Blasio to close the schools.
It has come from public health experts; three dozen infectious disease experts in New York signed a letter on Thursday calling on the mayor to close all schools.
And it has come from the collective actions of other school leaders: On Friday, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn said that its Catholic elementary schools in Brooklyn and Queens will be closed next week, affecting more than 41,000 students at 228 elementary schools. Hours earlier, Success Academy, New York City’s largest charter school network, announced it would close its schools to its 18,000 students and transition to online learning.
Yet the vast majority of the city’s 1,800 public schools are still up and running, and leaders here have insisted that they will remain open as long as possible.
“We are going to fight tooth and nail to protect our school system,”
Mr. de Blasio said on Thursday, adding, “we are going to do our damnedest to keep the schools open.”
On Friday evening, he doubled down on his pledge to not close schools, despite a significant drop in student attendance.
“We shut down the school system, we might not see it for the rest of the school year, we might not see the beginning of the new school year. And that weighs heavily on me,” he said, noting that experts have found that short-term closures have little impact on flattening the curve of the outbreak.
Addressing his critics, Mr. de Blasio said, “This isn’t a popularity contest, this is war.”
Mr. Cuomo, who is responsible for schools across the state, including New York City, said on Thursday that evidence from other countries was unclear about whether children were carriers of the virus, and said schools would remain open. Still, both leaders have said the city and state were planning for all potential scenarios, including mass closure.
Shutting city schools would likely lead to a broader shutdown of the city, and the decision would be more far-reaching in New York than in any other major American city.
But New York’s public school system dwarfs that of any other in the country: With 1.1 million children, it enrolls over 350,000 more students than the second-largest school district, Los Angeles Unified. The city also has a highly vulnerable student population, with about 750,000 students living at or below the poverty line, including roughly 114,000 who are homeless. [BBM]
