The union representing New York City’s principals said on Sunday that it had lost confidence in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to reopen schools and called on the state to seize control of the school system from the mayor, raising new obstacles in the city’s fraught reopening effort.
The mayor has twice delayed the start of in-person classes, and the vast majority of the city’s 1.1 million students have already started the school year remotely. Hundreds of thousands of students are set to report back to classrooms this week, with elementary school children expected to start in-person classes on Tuesday, followed by middle and high school students on Thursday.
But Mark Cannizzaro, the president of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, said the city still does not have enough teachers to staff city schools, and that last-minute deals hammered out between the teachers’ union and the city had further undermined principals’ trust in the mayor and their confidence in the reopening plan.
Still, Mr. Cannizzaro said that principals would report to buildings as scheduled this week and were not considering a strike. “I think parents should be confident that any child that arrives at a building will be given the utmost care,” Mr. Cannizzaro said.
But thousands of principals “must now look staff, parents and children in the eye and say that they have done all they can to provide a safe and quality educational experience, but given the limited resources provided them, this is becoming increasingly difficult,” he said.
Emily DeSantis, a spokeswoman for the State Education Department, said the department was “aware of the situation” and was “monitoring New York City’s reopening.” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a fellow Democrat who frequently clashes with Mr. de Blasio, does not control the State Education Department.
The announcement on Sunday thrust long-simmering tensions between the city’s principals’ and teachers’ unions into the spotlight. Mr. Cannizzaro said that the principals union had not been informed about an 11th-hour deal on staffing made between City Hall and the United Federation of Teachers on Friday that allowed more teachers to work from home if they are teaching students learning from home. The deal forced principals to again rearrange schedules during a holiday weekend.
The principals’ union has been warning for weeks of a major staffing crisis that was created by a deal made in late August between the U.F.T. and the de Blasio administration. That deal essentially mandated that schools create three groups of teachers: one to handle all-remote students, another to teach hybrid students when they are in the classroom and a third to teach hybrid students at home. That would have required schools to double their teaching staffs — during a hiring freeze, and with mass layoffs looming.
Principals across the city have said the requirements imposed by the teachers’ union and the city were simply impossible to fulfill, and many school leaders have said they could only provide effective instruction by skirting those rules.
Mr. de Blasio’s effort to reopen schools in New York City, which has one of the lowest virus positivity rates of any big city in America, has been plagued by political opposition and bureaucratic mismanagement. The city’s principals, who rarely wade into major political fights, have been publicly and privately raising alarms about reopening for months.
But the mayor largely brushed their concerns aside for many weeks, even as hundreds of principals said they could not fully staff their schools and that they could not answer urgent questions from their teachers, parents and students about the reopening effort.
While the teachers’ union had said earlier in the summer that schools were not ready to open because of safety issues, including outdated ventilation systems in aging school buildings and lack of school nurses, the city has been able to fulfill most of the U.F.T.’s safety demands. That union is now supportive of the city’s reopening plan.
