New York City’s public school system, the largest in the country, will give families another chance to enroll their children in face-to-face classes, following new guidelines released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Mayor Bill de Blasio at Friday.
The new orientation of the CDC allows elementary school students wearing masks to be separated by a meter away, instead of a meter and eighty, in reopened schools. The city’s primary schools, preschool programs and programs for children with complex disabilities will adopt the new distance guidelines in April, said de Blasio, allowing classrooms that have been operating at one third of capacity for many months to accommodate more students . With less distance needed between students, schools will be able to accommodate more children in each classroom in the city.
The city will continue to assess the risks of adjusting the distance rules for elementary and high school students, said de Blasio. The CDC said that its relaxed three-foot guideline only applies to students in elementary and high schools where community transmission is not high. (The state of New York has more recent cases per capita than any state except New Jersey, and the New York metropolitan area has the second highest rate of new cases in the country, behind Idaho Falls, Idaho.)
The guidance further maintains that adults in schools must keep six feet away from each other and from students. New York City teachers have been eligible for the coronavirus vaccine since January.
After the start of the school year, the city gave families just one opportunity, last fall, to choose face-to-face classes. The vast majority of parents, about 70%, chose to keep their children learning at home. Now, de Blasio said that families will have another chance to enroll their children in classroom learning starting next week. While it remains unclear whether more elementary and high school students will be able to return, de Blasio said the city hopes to have an idea of how many of the students who are learning remotely would like to move on to classroom teaching.
Some parents who chose remote learning last November, when virus cases were rising rapidly in New York City and there was no authorized coronavirus vaccine, said they are looking forward to sending their children to classrooms now that there is more clarity about the virus.
Even so, many non-white families in particular are still afraid of personal learning, and it is likely that a significant number of parents will keep their children at home until the end of the school year in June.
Class interrupted
Updated March 15, 2021
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New York schools, some of the first in the country to reopen, had extremely low positive test rates. Mr. de Blasio has pledged to fully reopen the city’s school system in September for full-time education for any child he wants. He also said he expects the city to maintain a full-time remote option for some children this fall.
Although the city’s teachers’ union did not endorse the mayor’s plan on Friday, saying it would consult its own specialist doctors, de Blasio said the city would move on.
“The end result is that children need to be in school,” he said.
Many parents who have opted for personal instruction agree. Elga Castro, mother of a third grader in Washington Heights, said her son has been having fun back in the classroom. But she wants more changes in the city to allow her son and many others to return more fully, including the elimination of a rule that requires school buildings to close if two unrelated positive cases are detected.
The changes are necessary, she said, “so that children can not only return fully to school, but to make the process more lasting and less disrupted.”