In-person attendance at some Big Apple schools is so low, instead of students, teachers expect to see tumbleweeds rolling down the hallways, staffers told The Post.
Three weeks after Mayor de Blasio trumpeted the reopening of schoolhouse doors to kids from 3-K to high school, the city Department of Education refuses to publicly report any daily attendance data.
But insiders working in largely deserted buildings revealed last week just how bad attendance has become.
“Ghost town is definitely the right word for it,” a Brooklyn high school teacher said. “It’s very quiet.”
The teacher said only a handful of students — if any — show up daily for class. But it’s not the kind of class de Blasio and Chancellor Richard Carranza have touted.
The few students in the room log onto laptops or iPads for lessons broadcast to the majority of kids in the class — remotely. One teen who lacks a device takes the class on his cell phone.
“It makes the mayor feel good about himself to say the schools are open, while kids literally shiver in rooms, bored and isolated, in front of screens,” the teacher said.
Last week, a lone student showed up for an English class — along with a trio of teachers — one for English, one special-ed, and one for native Spanish speakers.
But all three teachers gave lessons to remote students while the one in-person student, a girl, logged on.
“I felt bad for her,” the staffer said. “No teenager wants to go to high school and hang out out with a bunch of teachers.”
The DOE is trying to ”inflate” both in-person and remote attendance figures to ensure a flow of state and federal funds, including Title I money for schools with mostly kids from low-income families.
“Without efforts by the DOE to increase attendance, an already bad budget situation could get worse,” aid David Bloomfield, a Brooklyn College and CUNY Grad Center education professor.
Schools are co-mingling in-person and remote attendance. If students are scheduled to show up in person but appear online, DOE execs say they should be marked present, records show.
“We are figuring this out as we go,” a school administrator told staff in an email.
More students are switching to 100% remote instruction. Last week, the percentage of all-remote kids inched up to 50%.
Meanwhile, more teachers are receiving permission to work from home if they live with family members at risk of severe illness or death from COVID-19.
For two days last week, a special-ed teacher was told to leave a classroom where he was required by law to aid students with disabilities. He then gathered four students who showed up for different classes with absent teachers and put them in a room to log on.
“They weren’t getting any help from me. I was just making sure the students were keeping their masks on and babysitting,” the teacher said.
Low in-person attendance is also plaguing some elementary schools.
At the Fresh Creek School, PS 325, in East New York, a staffer told The Post the 200-student school had only 10 kids show up on Sept. 30, the second day of in-person classes, and 12 on Oct. 1.
“This is disgraceful,” the staffer said, calling the presence of two administrators, teachers and paraprofessionals “wasteful.”
DOE spokesman Nathaniel Styer said, “Superintendents and district teams respond quickly to address any issues of absenteeism, and Fresh Creek School is conducting daily outreach to help every student engage either in-person or remotely every day.”
Styer would not explain why the city is withholding attendance data.
