Mayor Bill de Blasio walked briskly out the back door of a high school in the Bronx, climbed into his SUV and kicked off another virtual war-room meeting with top aides. They had been assembled to help pull off one of the most ambitious — and riskiest — mayoral initiatives in decades: reopening the nation’s largest public school system during the pandemic.
As his car hit traffic en route to Gracie Mansion, the mayor began hammering away at the city’s effort to hastily upgrade ventilation systems in century-old school buildings. Ventilation inspectors have been examining hundreds of schools a day, and by Monday, had visited a total of 1,321 buildings. The mayor told aides how he had personally looked over ventilation units in classrooms, holding his hand over one to feel the airflow.
The push to reopen schools, which is crucial for the city’s economic recovery, has been an enormous effort in a system with 1.1 million children and 75,000 teachers, not to mention tens of thousands of administrators and other workers.
Officials have vowed to distribute four million face masks, 3.5 million bottles of hand sanitizer and 80,000 containers of disinfectant wipes. More than 3,500 electrostatic sprayers — special equipment that has been used on the subway — are being deployed to disinfect surfaces.
Behind the scenes at City Hall, the team tasked with carrying out the mayor’s school reopening plan has been working around the clock. One official recently fired off an email with an edited spreadsheet around 4:30 a.m. — and was startled to get a reply from a colleague just a few minutes later.
The meetings have grown tense: Some of the mayor’s advisers have urged him to consider delaying the Sept. 10 start of in-person classes because of escalating opposition. Principals have said plans are too haphazard and not yet ready. Teachers have threatened an illegal strike over fears that buildings are unsafe. Parents are so worried that hundreds of thousands are keeping children at home.
Mr. de Blasio has so far resisted any postponement of the reopening, leaving him an increasingly isolated figure — a product of his waning political capital and the harried nature of such a complicated undertaking.
The schools chancellor, Richard A. Carranza, began a recent memo to principals with a reminder of the tremendous pressure that the administration is under. “There are many things that keep me up at night,” he wrote. Mr. Carranza had begun a virtual meeting with parents the other evening at 6 p.m. and finished just before 4 a.m.
If Mr. de Blasio succeeds in bringing many of the city’s children back into classrooms, he will stand apart from every other big-city mayor in America, all of whom have delayed in-person schooling as the virus has surged in their cities and political opposition to reopening has intensified.
“It’s extraordinarily weighty, we are on a tightrope, there’s no question about it,” Mr. de Blasio said in a recent interview in an empty Bronx classroom.
The educations of hundreds of thousands of children hang in the balance, and many families are desperate for their children to return to schools. New York City has so far defied predictions of a second wave of the outbreak. In recent days, the positivity rate for virus tests has hovered around only 0.6 percent, far lower than the national average.
Still, the fear that reopening will touch off a wave of new cases of cases has not ebbed. Each day seems to bring more calls from elected officials, educators and others to delay the start of in-person classes.
As a result, the decision has turned into a bold gamble by Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat in his final term whose approval rating was unimpressive even before critics pounced on his handling of the pandemic.
The mayor said he felt a duty to give the city’s overwhelmingly low-income, Black and Hispanic children the option of returning to classrooms, explaining that he was fearful the city would be “permanently disabling kids educationally” if it did not at least try to reopen schools.
“How would we feel morally if we looked back months later and said, you know, we could have done this?” the mayor asked.
About 750,000 public schoolchildren in New York City are poor, roughly 200,000 have disabilities and 114,000 are homeless.
Under the mayor’s plan, most children will report to school between one and three days a week, and have online classes the other days. They will return to classrooms that have been transformed since they left suddenly in March.
Desks will be spaced six feet apart, so most classes will have only nine or 10 children at a time, about a third of the typical capacity. Students, teachers and other staff will be required to wear masks all day, except for a quick lunch period held in classrooms.
Many hallways will be marked with signs indicating where students should line up to maintain distance in hallways and bathrooms. Windows will be open, even during cold and rainy days, to allow for more fresh air.
The research on school reopening in places with similarly low virus transmission rates largely bolsters the mayor’s decision to welcome children back into classrooms. Research from Europe has shown that schools can successfully open as long as the virus is contained in their region and families understand there will be some unavoidable turbulence.
Public health experts generally agree that New York City’s schools can reopen, as long as adequate testing and strict safety measures are in place.
Reopening schools could also help stabilize the economy. Nearly 70 percent of employers ranked the reopening as one of the three most important issues determining their employees’ return to the office, according to a recent survey conducted by a business group, the Partnership for New York City.
Still, a broad coalition of elected officials and parent groups have called on the mayor to delay the start of school by at least a week, including the unions representing teachers and principals, along with hundreds of principals and more than two dozen City Council members. The Council speaker, Corey Johnson, and Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, are also seeking a postponement.
“Please don’t take this needless risk,” Mr. Williams said over the weekend. “It’s truly not worth it.”
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has repeatedly cast doubt on the mayor’s decision, at one point saying he was unsure he would send his daughters if they were still of school age. Mr. Cuomo has said all schools in the state can reopen, but has been conspicuously absent from the push to reopen schools in New York City.
Schools Reopening ›
Back to School
Updated Aug. 31, 2020
The latest on how schools are reopening amid the pandemic.
-
- Cases, hospitalizations and deaths from the coronavirus have increased at a faster rate in children and teenagers than among the general public, data compiled by the American Academy of Pediatrics from the summer show.
- Universities that are trying to reopen with in-person classes are pioneering Covid tests and tracking apps that could help society combat the pandemic.
- Privately owned bus companies, which carry nearly 10 million children to school a year, are facing an unparalleled threat to their survival.
- Resident advisers in college dorms have been drafted to enforce mask wearing and social distancing rules, and to report on fellow students who violate those rules.
On Monday, Mr. Cuomo said he expected the turbulent experience of colleges — many of which have had to at least temporarily shelve their in-person education plans, following outbreaks — to be “replicated” by the state’s schools.
“I think you will see K-to-12, just like colleges, they’ll have a plan, they’ll open, and that you will see a certain number that close,” Mr. Cuomo said.
Michael Mulgrew, the leader of the city’s teachers’ union, the United Federation of Teachers, has declared that the mayor’s legacy will be tarnished if he reopens schools as planned.
“It is our judgment at this point that if you open schools Sept. 10, it will be one of the biggest debacles in history,” Mr. Mulgrew said.
Mr. Mulgrew, one of the most influential labor leaders in the city, has faced enormous pressure from his members who are fearful about returning to classrooms. The business community has urged him to not obstruct reopening, but he has suggested that he might authorize an illegal strike.
The city’s principals, a typically apolitical group, have also raised issues that the city has not yet been able to fully answer. They say they do not yet know how many children will physically report to school, and warn of a teacher staffing crisis that makes it next to impossible for them to create two complementary versions of school — one in-person and one online.
“We are nowhere near ready,” a group of Bronx principals recently wrote in a letter to the mayor. “We cannot provide a reasonable expectation to families that we will keep their children safe, despite the valiant efforts of our school communities.”
Mr. de Blasio has adopted an increasingly antagonistic posture toward union leaders. His advisers have pointed out that many other public servants have physically reported to work during the height of the pandemic, including transit employees and child care workers.
The mayor has also made clear that his determination to reopen the schools stems from his commitment to helping working-class parents.
“They need this, it’s not optional to them,” Mr. de Blasio said of working public school parents. He characterized some of the pushback to reopening as political expediency from officials trying to bolster their own standing with the unions.
No New York City mayor has faced this much pressure over a single decision in the last century, said Wilbur C. Rich, a professor emeritus at Wellesley College who has written two books on mayoral politics.
“I hope he can pull it off, but I really think that it’s going to be very difficult,” Professor Rich said. “If it collapses on him, that’s going to be his legacy — he’s the guy who sent these kids back to schools.”
Polls and interviews suggest that Black and Hispanic parents, who tend to live in neighborhoods most heavily impacted by the virus, are more fearful and unsure about whether to send children back.
White parents are more willing to send their children back into classrooms than parents of color, according to a recent poll conducted by The Education Trust, a research group. About 34 percent of city parents have already decided to keep their children at home full time, and that number is almost certain to climb over the next few weeks.
Still, over 60 percent of parents are tentatively planning to send their children back into schools later this month — over 600,000 families.
Recent waves of teacher strikes across America have been successful in large part because striking educators had the support of parents. But Mr. de Blasio recently warned that families were unlikely to support a teacher strike here, essentially daring the union to adopt a costly, disruptive and potentially unpopular action.
“I don’t think the people of this city ever feel good about public servants not being there when people need them,” the mayor said.
