New York City will welcome high school students back to classrooms from March 22, Mayor Bill de Blasio will announce on Monday an important milestone in the city’s efforts to resume teaching face-to-face for some of its one million students.
At a time when instruction in some cities in the Northeast and many on the West Coast remains completely remote for high school and even some elementary school students, New York’s decision to bring high school students back – the vast majority low-income, black and Latino – will be seen as an important precedent. The city’s public school system is by far the largest in the country.
Reopening high schools will be the first major task faced by the new school chancellor, Meisha Porter, who will take the place of the outgoing chancellor, Richard A. Carranza, on March 15.
About half of the city’s 488 high schools will offer full-time instruction to most or all of their face-to-face students, while the other half will offer hybrid instruction. The city will also restart high school sports for all students, including those who have decided to learn at a distance. The sports season runs during the summer of this year, instead of ending with the school year, and students will be required to wear masks all the time.
Even with the return of up to 55,000 high school students who signed up for face-to-face classes last fall and haven’t been to classrooms since November – out of a total population of 282,000 high school students – only about a third of all students of the city will receive instructions in person. The approximately 700,000 remaining students across the city system chose to receive instruction remotely, largely because of lingering concerns about the health risks of coronavirus.
In other major school districts, including Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago and Seattle, many thousands of high school students received no face-to-face instruction in the past year and may not regain access to their classrooms for months.
While some major districts in the south, including Houston, Miami and Broward County in Florida, are open for all grades, other districts have focused on bringing elementary students back first. This is because remote learning is particularly challenging for younger children and because research has found that face-to-face learning can be safer with younger children than with older children.
Still, high school students in New York and across the country have struggled immensely with the social isolation of remote learning. Teenagers have been stranded in their rooms for months, unable to see their friends or connect face to face with their teachers. Some districts are seeing higher than average student suicide rates.
New York’s effort to bring tens of thousands of high school students back to classrooms will allow some graduates to come together – and will reinforce the mayor’s track record in reopening schools, a high priority for him during the pandemic.
The next phase of school reopening comes with significant caveats. At least for now, only high school students who signed up for face-to-face classes last fall will be able to return to classrooms, joining elementary students, who returned in December, and high school students, who returned at the end of the month. past. This means that only about a third of the city’s millions of students are qualified for face-to-face learning by the end of this school year, which ends on June 25.
Some high school students who returned to classrooms in the fall may not even return this spring, either because they settled in remote education or because of concerns about the virus’s high rate of positivity and the threat of new variants.
Elementary and high school students were able to attend face-to-face classes for just about six weeks last fall, before the entire system was shut down in November due to rising virus rates. High schools are the last to reopen in part because of a lack of testing capacity and because some high schools have been used as vaccination centers for New Yorkers.
Even in October and November, some high school students had only a few days of face-to-face learning, alternating between school buildings and virtual classes in their homes to allow social distance.
This hybrid learning model has proved challenging for many high schools, and some large schools have told students that they could only offer normal class hours if most students learn at home full time.
Some high schools ended up offering distance learning even to children who have physically returned to classrooms. These students sat in front of their laptops, taking online courses in their school buildings, rather than in their living rooms. It is unclear whether high schools will continue with this model, which frustrated many parents in the spring.
With the school year more than half over, Mr. de Blasio concentrated most of his efforts on reopening classrooms, instead of improving online teaching for hundreds of thousands of students who chose to learn at home this school year. .
Many parents and educators said they would like there to be more focus on online classes, mainly because non-white families chose not to study in person at higher rates than white families.
The mayor has spent months negotiating the gradual reopening of classrooms with the Federation of United Teachers, a powerful force in city policy that has won a series of security measures, including a rule that school buildings should temporarily close when two cases of viruses undetected are found.
This rule has led to the closure of hundreds of schools for ten days in just the past few weeks, which has been extremely damaging to working parents and their children. Mr. de Blasio said he would consider changing the rule, but there are no changes to the security protocols yet.
Although the relationship between Mr. de Blasio and UFT has become increasingly tense in the last year, the union ended up sending many of its members back to classrooms long before they were vaccinated. Vaccines have become an obstacle to the reopening of other unions, although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recently said that vaccinating teachers should not be a condition for reopening.
Teachers in New York have had access to the vaccine since January, which means that many educators returning to high school classrooms will have been vaccinated against the virus. But even before any teacher or staff was vaccinated, municipal schools were relatively safe places, with very low virus transmission in schools and without major outbreaks.