New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Monday that high school students will return to face-to-face instruction on March 22, representing a major step forward in the process of returning to normal from the coronavirus pandemic.
The struggle to resolve face-to-face school attendance has been a central policy for de Blasio, even though the threat of teenagers as propagators remains a problem.
The mayor remains optimistic that the city will be able to cope with the initial return, which will present a mix of strategies. About half of the city’s 488 high schools will offer full-time education to most or all of its face-to-face students, while the other half will use hybrid education, the New York Times reported.
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“We have all the pieces we need to bring back high school and hard and, of course, to bring it back safely,” said de Blasio at a news conference. “We are bringing our schools back fully in September, period.”
The decision is probably based on the recent decline and plateau of new cases in the United States and, specifically, in New York: From the peak of about 14,000 new cases daily on January 11, the city recorded about 7,200 new cases on 7 March.
Only students who signed up for face-to-face classes in the fall can attend classrooms, totaling about 55,000 of the 282,000 high school students across the city, according to Reuters.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recently remained consistent with their message that younger students can return safely – with safety measures in place – without requiring teachers to receive vaccines – but high schools have been shown to be more problematic.
Vaccines have been approved so far for people aged 16 and over, which means that high school populations are possibly vulnerable to infection.
These concerns led to a heated debate last month, with some officials blaming teachers’ unions for resisting personal returns to any grade, despite guidance from the CDC.
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Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot spent weeks arguing with the local teachers’ union to agree on a plan for returning preschoolers to eighth grade.
Union president Jesse Sharkey said the plan “was not what any of us deserved. Not us. Not our students. Not their families.”
Lightfoot described the Chicago Teacher’s Union as “similar to a political party”.
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New York City hosts the largest school system in the United States, with 1.1 million students.